Hack The Box Bedside Stats (Medium Linux)
HTB Bedside: active medium Linux box, Season 11 week 9. Rated 4.3/5 from 205 reviews, 4,533 user owns. Difficulty read and prep, spoiler-free.
Bedside is week 9 of Hack The Box Season 11, a medium Linux machine by holdthefort, worth 30 points and 845 XP. It is still active, so what follows is the season data and an honest read of the difficulty. No chain, no flags.
The numbers
| Machine ID | 927 |
| Difficulty | Medium (30 pts / 845 XP) |
| OS | Linux |
| Released | 2026-07-18 (week 9) |
| Maker | holdthefort |
| Rating | 4.3 / 5 from 205 reviews |
| User owns | 4,533 |
| Root owns | 4,244 |
| User → root drop | 6.4% |
| User blood | 7m 57s by s30s0ft |
| Root blood | 10m 32s by s30s0ft |
Community difficulty votes:
| Bucket | Votes | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Medium | 1,072 | 37.7% |
| Bit Hard | 520 | 18.3% |
| Too Easy | 446 | 15.7% |
| Hard | 266 | 9.4% |
| Easy | 236 | 8.3% |
Total votes: 2,841.
Difficulty read
Bedside is an honest Medium that the community liked, at 4.3 stars from 205 reviews, with the difficulty votes centered on Medium (1,072 of 2,841) and Bit Hard as the runner-up at 520. It plays a touch above its label for most people, which is generally a compliment.
Both bloods went to the same player, s30s0ft, 2m35s apart: user at 7m57s, root at 10m32s. The 6.3% user-to-root drop confirms the pattern: the privesc is not the wall.
Which puts the weight on the foothold again. Roughly 4,533 people got in, well down from the Easy boxes either side of it, so the entry point takes real work to find.
A good box to run if you want a Medium that behaves like one: no gimmicks, no guessing, and 845 XP at the end.
What to have ready
- Full TCP sweep, then UDP on the top 100. Mediums are where a forgotten SNMP or TFTP service starts mattering.
- Enumerate every vhost. On this tier the foothold usually lives on a name you have to find, not on the default site.
- If there’s an app you can name, go read its source on GitHub rather than firing exploits at it. Version-matched source review is the fastest path on a Medium.
- Know the injection families cold: SSTI, deserialization, SSRF into an internal service, and file-upload chains that end in a webshell.
- Privesc: enumerate as every user you land on, not just the first.
linpeas, then group membership, then anything in/optthat someone wrote themselves.
When the writeup lands
We publish full chains after a box retires, never while it’s active, and we don’t hand them to anyone outside the team. Bedside retires at the end of Season 11, and the writeup goes up that week, in the same format as the HTB Doctor one.
If you’d rather not wait, the team’s internal notes go out in our Discord first. That’s also where people work through active boxes together, which is the part you’re actually allowed to do while Bedside is still live.
Related writeups
Retired Linux boxes we’ve already published: