Hack The Box BlockSynergy Stats (Insane Linux)
HTB BlockSynergy: active insane Linux box closing Season 11, 3.9/5 from 95 reviews, 1,546 user owns. Difficulty read and prep, spoiler-free.
BlockSynergy is the closing machine of Hack The Box Season 11, an active insane Linux box by R00cKet, worth 50 points and 1,365 XP, released 2026-08-29. It has been live for under two weeks, and the community has already voted Brain Fuck into the fullest difficulty bucket. No chain, no flags, no spoilers.
The numbers
| Machine ID | 975 |
| Difficulty | Insane (50 pts / 1,365 XP) |
| OS | Linux |
| Released | 2026-08-29 (Season 11) |
| Status | active, 12 days live |
| Maker | R00cKet |
| Rating | 3.9 / 5 from 95 reviews |
| User owns | 1,546 |
| Root owns | 1,398 |
| User → root drop | 9.6% |
| User blood | 16m 51s by C4sh3R |
| Root blood | 1h 38m 55s by admiin |
Community difficulty votes:
| Bucket | Votes | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Brain Fuck | 257 | 25.1% |
| Hard | 175 | 17.1% |
| Too Hard | 166 | 16.2% |
| Ex Hard | 161 | 15.7% |
| Medium | 78 | 7.6% |
Total votes: 1,025.
Is HTB BlockSynergy hard?
The vote distribution puts it in an odd place. Brain Fuck is the fullest bucket, at 257 of 1,025 votes, which sounds damning until you notice that this is true of every Insane on the board and of DarkZeroReturns, which is only a Hard. What separates them is how full that bucket gets: 71.5% on TrustFall, 44.9% on PingPong, and 25.1% here, against 60.4% on Hercules and 34.2% on Eloquia before they retired. Stack Brain Fuck with Ex Hard (161) and 41% of voters put this beyond the Insane label, against 78 who argued Medium. Weighted out to a single number that is 74.9 of 100, the lowest of the three Insanes still live and below DarkZeroReturns at 78.2.
So it is the most approachable Insane on the board, and also the one people like least. At 3.9 from 95 reviews it is the lowest-rated Insane still live, behind TrustFall at 4.8, PingPong at 4.7 and Autopilot at 4.5, and a tenth clear of Cohort, which is an Easy. Easier than its tier-mates and less enjoyed than any of them is a specific combination, and worth knowing before you spend a weekend on it.
Bloods went 16m51s to user (C4sh3R) and 1h38m55s to root (admiin), an hour and twenty minutes apart, which is a wide gap for a box whose entry fell in under twenty minutes. The user-to-root drop backs it: 9.6%, so of 1,546 people who took user, 148 never took root.
Read those together and the shape is clear enough. The foothold is not what stops people; the privilege escalation is, and enough of the field found it unpleasant to move the vote into the top bucket.
How this box got the Season 11 closing slot
BlockSynergy was the thirteenth and last machine of Season 11, which closed on 2026-09-05, and the only Insane on the whole board that season. That made it the largest single payout of the season by a wide margin: 50 points and 1,365 XP against 20 for an Easy.
It is also the first machine its maker has released. R00cKet is a Pro Hacker out of Germany who joined in August 2024, with 131 user owns and 124 system owns to their name, and BlockSynergy is the only box in their content list. There is no back catalogue to read for a house style here, which cuts both ways: no signature to pattern-match, and no track record either.
The release slot itself has a history. Season 11’s machine IDs march in steps of three (900, 903, 906, 909, 912, 915, 918, 921, then 927, 930, 933, 936), and the season’s Insane was originally TrustFall, ID 963, scheduled for 2026-08-15. It did not release on the day. Two Saturdays passed with nothing on the board, and the slot came back as BlockSynergy at ID 975, a Linux box from a different maker. TrustFall finally dropped on 2026-09-11, four weeks late and outside the season, so read BlockSynergy as a late substitution rather than a planned finale.
Insane boxes have a way of ending seasons quietly: most of the field never touches them. 1,546 user owns in the first two weeks is respectable for the tier, but it is a tenth of what Reactor, the season’s Easy, took. If you intend to be in the minority that finishes it, the prep below is the part to have done already.
What to have ready
- Budget days, not hours, and keep a running notes file. Insane Linux boxes are lost to a credential you found on day one and forgot by day three.
- Full TCP plus UDP, then re-scan after every pivot. The internal surface is where the real box lives; the external one is just the door.
- Expect custom code. Pull the application source, read it properly, and look for logic and trust flaws rather than CVE-shaped holes.
- Have
ligolo-ngorchiselworking end to end before you start, and assume more than one hop between you and root. - Container escapes, writable systemd units, capabilities, and inter-service trust are the recurring joints. Enumerate as every user and every service account you land on.
When the BlockSynergy 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. Season 11 has closed but BlockSynergy has not retired, and boxes typically stay live for months after their season ends, so the writeup goes up the week it does retire, in the same format as the HTB Manage 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 BlockSynergy is still live.
Related writeups
Retired Linux boxes we’ve already published: