100MB too large to transfer over VPN?

HTB Content Machines
1

I’m working on a new machine for you guys to attack, and I’ve got a really nice idea for a way you could get some credentials but it would require reading/copying a 100 MB file from the box. That is the absolute smallest I can make the file unfortunately (can’t explain much more without spoiling it).

Would people think that’s ok or would some of you say that’s going to take too long to copy over the VPN?

For me it would be ok, but I don’t know what everyone else’s connections to the servers are like so just looking to get feedback before I go ahead with this.

EDIT: Managed to get it down to 75 MB, is that acceptable?

2

I pulled a much larger file from Bastion (yaaay first HTB machine feelz) when I was starting out with HTB and was a (bigger) idiot. :slight_smile:

3

I wouldnt care, 75-100 MB nowadays is small enough. Maybe people with slower connections and free servers may suffer a bit but… i’m sure people will figure out a way.

4

Type your comment> @idomino said:

I pulled a much larger file from Bastion (yaaay first HTB machine feelz) when I was starting out with HTB and was a (bigger) idiot. :slight_smile:

haha that was my first machine too and I know the file you’re talking about

5

@4v3r4g3 said:
I wouldnt care, 75-100 MB nowadays is small enough.

that’s my thought too but just wanted to check with others rather than assuming everyone is the same as me

6

IMHO it isn’t that large but some considerations:

  1. it will make it nearly impossible on the freeservers which seem to get reset every few minutes.

  2. There will be people who may struggle to process something that size - obviously this depends on what you want them to do with the file - both in terms of RAM impact and disk space. (Yeah 100mb is small compared to most disk drives but I’ve seen the questions people ask here…)

  3. Some people will complain about it.

7

Yeah I hadn’t thought about resets actually, good point.

Surely no one here is going to run out of RAM or disc space by working with a 75 MB file though? This isn’t 1995.

8

@VbScrub said:

Surely no one here is going to run out of RAM or disc space by working with a 75 MB file though? This isn’t 1995.

Nothing surprises me here any more.

(edited to add - but yeah, it does depend on what you want them to do with it really. Some processes are more intensive than others)

9

Haha I do kinda know what you mean after a couple of the messages I’ve received about my Nest box.

I’ll do some testing just accessing the file across a network rather than copying the whole thing locally and see if that works fine

10

You could always try compressing it into multiple files.

11

oh yeah ■■■■ I didn’t even think of compressing it haha thanks for the kick.

EDIT: Hmm compressing gets it down to 40 MB but would mean people HAVE to copy that entire thing over to their machine and extract it. Might actually be better off having it be 75 MB but having the option for people to just access it directly across the network and only read chunks of it at a time (but I need to look into how the programs that work with this file format actually work, and see if they read the entire thing into memory)