Hack The Box MakeSense Stats (Medium Linux)
HTB MakeSense: retired medium Linux box, Season 11 week 7. Rated 3.6/5 from 265 reviews, 5,157 user owns. Final stats and prep, spoiler-free.
MakeSense was week 7 of Hack The Box Season 11, a medium Linux machine by SamLyhin and vldmrrz, worth 30 points and 650 XP. It has retired, so what follows is the final season data and an honest read of the difficulty. No chain, no flags.
The numbers
| Machine ID | 918 |
| Difficulty | Medium (30 pts / 650 XP) |
| OS | Linux |
| Released | 2026-07-04 (week 7) |
| Status | retired, between 2026-09-20 and 2026-11-09 |
| Maker | SamLyhin, vldmrrz |
| Rating | 3.6 / 5 from 265 reviews |
| User owns | 5,157 |
| Root owns | 4,918 |
| User → root drop | 4.6% |
| User blood | 4m 59s by Salzstange |
| Root blood | 9m 4s by Salzstange |
Community difficulty votes:
| Bucket | Votes | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Medium | 986 | 32.6% |
| Too Easy | 555 | 18.3% |
| Bit Hard | 441 | 14.6% |
| Easy | 431 | 14.2% |
| Hard | 247 | 8.2% |
Total votes: 3,026.
Difficulty read
MakeSense finished as the season’s second-lowest rated box at 3.6 stars from 265 reviews, above only Connected’s 3.3, and the difficulty votes explain why: it was polarizing. Medium took the plurality at 986 of 3,026, but Too Easy came second at 555 with Bit Hard right behind at 441. People finished this box with genuinely different impressions of it.
The mechanics were quick. User blood at 4m59s, root at 9m04s, and a 4.6% user-to-root drop. Once you were on, you were almost certainly rooting it.
That combination of fast, short and divisive usually means a foothold that either clicks immediately or doesn’t click at all. If you saw it, the box took an hour. If you didn’t, you bounced off the same surface for an evening.
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. MakeSense has retired, so the chain is clear to publish and the writeup goes up in the same format as the HTB Forgotten 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 Linux boxes we’ve already published: