Hack The Box Hercules Stats (Insane Windows)
HTB Hercules: retired insane Windows box, 4.7/5 from 159 reviews, 2,131 user owns. Final stats, difficulty read and prep. Spoiler-free, no flags.
Hercules was an active Hack The Box machine, an insane Windows box by birkk, released 2025-10-18 in Season 9, worth 50 points and 1,050 XP. It retired after roughly eleven months live, so what follows is the final data and an honest read of the difficulty. No chain, no flags, no spoilers.
HTB Hercules at a glance
| Machine ID | 778 |
| Difficulty | Insane (50 pts / 1,050 XP) |
| OS | Windows |
| Released | 2025-10-18 (Season 9) |
| Status | retired, between 2026-09-10 and 2026-09-20 |
| Maker | birkk |
| Rating | 4.7 / 5 from 159 reviews |
| User owns | 2,131 |
| Root owns | 1,908 |
| User → root drop | 10.5% |
| User blood | 11h 42m 22s by f69 |
| Root blood | 17h 50m 59s by NLTE |
Community difficulty votes:
| Bucket | Votes | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Brain Fuck | 1,427 | 60.4% |
| Ex Hard | 360 | 15.2% |
| Too Hard | 201 | 8.5% |
| Hard | 159 | 6.7% |
| Cake | 93 | 3.9% |
Total votes: 2,361.
Is HTB Hercules hard?
Hercules finished with the most lopsided difficulty histogram any machine had held while it was live: 1,427 of 2,361 votes (60.4%) landed on Brainfuck. Only TrustFall has since gone further, at 71.5% on a far smaller sample. The 4.7 rating from 159 reviews says the people who got through it were glad they did.
The bloods are the real headline. User blood took f69 11h42m; root blood took NLTE 17h50m. Most Insane boxes bleed inside three hours. Eleven hours to first user on a global field of top-tier players is a different category of problem.
2,131 people took user and 1,908 took root, a 10.5% drop, on a box that stayed live from October 2025 until September 2026. Once Cobblestone retired in August it was the oldest machine left on the board.
It was a project rather than an evening. Worth attempting if you want to find the edge of what you can do with Active Directory and patience, but go in with a plan for tracking state, because the box will outlast your memory of what you already tried.
What to have ready for Hercules
- Plan for a multi-day box. Take structured notes from minute one. Insane boxes are lost to forgotten credentials far more often than to missing skills.
- Full AD groundwork, then trusts, then cross-forest. Assume nothing anonymous works and that every easy path is deliberately closed.
- Pivoting is mandatory, not optional. Have
ligolo-ngworking end to end before you start, and expect to chain more than one hop. - Expect custom code, bespoke services, or a protocol implementation you have to read. Insane boxes reward reverse engineering and patient primitive-chaining.
- Track every credential, hash, ticket and certificate in one place with where it came from and what it opened. That table is what actually solves the box.
When the Hercules 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. Hercules has retired, so the chain is clear to publish and the writeup goes up in the same format as the HTB Escape one.
The team’s internal notes still go out in our Discord first. That’s also where people work through the boxes that are still active together.
Related writeups
Retired Windows boxes we’ve already published: