Hack The Box Nimbus Stats (Hard Linux)
HTB Nimbus: active hard Linux box, Season 11 week 5. Rated 4.5/5 from 192 reviews, 4,445 user owns. Difficulty read and prep, spoiler-free.
Nimbus is week 5 of Hack The Box Season 11, a hard Linux machine by dotguy and TheCyberGeek, worth 40 points and 1,105 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 | 912 |
| Difficulty | Hard (40 pts / 1,105 XP) |
| OS | Linux |
| Released | 2026-06-20 (week 5) |
| Maker | dotguy, TheCyberGeek |
| Rating | 4.5 / 5 from 192 reviews |
| User owns | 4,445 |
| Root owns | 3,649 |
| User → root drop | 17.9% |
| User blood | 7m 8s by Ap4sh |
| Root blood | 48m 42s by s30s0ft |
Community difficulty votes:
| Bucket | Votes | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Hard | 717 | 26.7% |
| Too Hard | 382 | 14.2% |
| Medium | 371 | 13.8% |
| Bit Hard | 358 | 13.3% |
| Too Easy | 243 | 9.0% |
Total votes: 2,690.
Difficulty read
Nimbus has the most distinctive shape of any released box this season. User blood fell in 7m08s, faster than several of the Easy boxes, and root blood took 48m42s. That 41m34s gap is the widest of any Linux box in Season 11.
The user-to-root drop backs it up at 17.9%, second only to Connected. Nearly one in five people who got in never got root.
So: approachable foothold, punishing privesc. The community votes agree it’s a real Hard, with Hard, Too Hard and Bit Hard taking about 54% of 2,690 votes between them, and they liked it anyway, at 4.5 stars. That’s the best rating of any Linux box this season.
Plan your time accordingly. If you budget the usual split of recon-heavy, privesc-light, you will run out of evening. The foothold is not where this box lives.
What to have ready
- Assume multiple hops. Map the whole surface before exploiting anything. Hard boxes punish tunnel vision more than they punish slow recon.
- Have pivoting ready before you need it:
chiselorligolo-ngset up and tested, plusproxychainsconfigured, so an internal service doesn’t stall you for an hour. - Expect a custom application. Source review, logic flaws and chained primitives beat scanner output at this tier.
- Containers and service accounts matter. Check whether your shell is in a container, then look at what it can reach rather than what it can read.
- Privesc will be a chain rather than a one-liner. Capabilities, writable systemd units, misconfigured group membership and inter-service trust are the usual joints.
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. Nimbus retires at the end of Season 11, and the writeup goes up that week, in the same format as the HTB Mango 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 Nimbus is still live.
Related writeups
Retired Linux boxes we’ve already published: