Hack The Box Management Stats (Easy Linux)
HTB Management: active easy Linux box, 3.5/5 from 80 reviews, 1,510 user owns. Live stats, difficulty read and prep. Spoiler-free, no flags.
Management is an active Hack The Box machine, an easy Linux box by TheCyberGeek, released 2026-09-12 outside the seasonal rotation, worth 20 points and 585 XP. It has been live for eight days and has not retired, so what follows is the current data and an honest read of the difficulty. No chain, no flags, no spoilers.
HTB Management at a glance
| Machine ID | 981 |
| Difficulty | Easy (20 pts / 585 XP) |
| OS | Linux |
| Released | 2026-09-12 |
| Status | active, eight days live |
| Maker | TheCyberGeek |
| Rating | 3.5 / 5 from 80 reviews |
| User owns | 1,510 |
| Root owns | 1,422 |
| User → root drop | 5.8% |
| User blood | 6m 1s by Retro16 |
| Root blood | 6m 54s by Retro16 |
Community difficulty votes:
| Bucket | Votes | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Easy | 312 | 28.8% |
| Too Easy | 271 | 25.0% |
| Medium | 193 | 17.8% |
| Bit Hard | 84 | 7.7% |
| Cake | 66 | 6.1% |
Total votes: 1,085.
Is HTB Management hard?
No. The bloods settle it: Retro16 took user at 6m01s and root at 6m54s, the same player, 53 seconds apart. A box where the privesc costs under a minute to somebody seeing it for the first time does not have a second half.
The votes agree. Easy and Too Easy take 583 of 1,085 between them, with Cake adding another 66. Weight the ten buckets from Cake to Brainfuck and it scores 41.1 out of 100, which is the softest reading of anything currently on the board.
The 5.8% user-to-root drop is the other half of the same story: 1,510 people got in and 1,422 finished. On most Easy boxes that gap is where a meaningful chunk of players stall, and here it barely exists.
What the numbers do not explain is the 3.5 rating, which is low for a box this approachable and puts it level with SmartHire, since retired, and above only Connected and Scaffold. Read that as a comment on the experience rather than the difficulty. Eighty reviews is a thin sample this early, so the score may still move.
Take it as a fast, clean Easy and a sensible first Linux box. TheCyberGeek has thirty-five machines on the platform, going back to Postman and Schooled, so the construction is unlikely to be the problem.
What to have ready for Management
- Full TCP sweep first:
nmap -p- --min-rate 2000then a targeted-sC -sVon what answers. Easy boxes still hide the point of entry on a high port. - Add the hostname to
/etc/hoststhe moment you see a redirect. Half the failed Easy attempts are people scanning an IP that only serves a vhost. - Vhost and content discovery in parallel:
ffufwith a subdomain wordlist againstHost:, andferoxbusterfor paths, with extensions matched to whatever the stack turns out to be. - Read the source of every page you land on. Comments, JS bundles and
.gitleftovers carry more Easy footholds than any exploit does. - For privesc:
sudo -lbefore anything else, thenlinpeas, then SUID, capabilities, cron and writable service files, in that order.
When the Management 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. Management is still live, so the writeup goes up the week it retires, 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 Management is still live.
Related writeups
Retired Linux boxes we’ve already published: