Hack The Box PingPong Stats (Insane Windows)
HTB PingPong: active insane Windows box, 4.7/5 from 151 reviews, 1,973 user owns. Live stats, difficulty read and prep. Spoiler-free, no flags.
PingPong is an active Hack The Box machine, an insane Windows box by Geiseric, released 2026-04-25 in Season 10, worth 50 points and 1,365 XP. It has been live for 4 months 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 PingPong at a glance
| Machine ID | 891 |
| Difficulty | Insane (50 pts / 1,365 XP) |
| OS | Windows |
| Released | 2026-04-25 (Season 10) |
| Status | active, 4 months live |
| Maker | Geiseric |
| Rating | 4.7 / 5 from 151 reviews |
| User owns | 1,973 |
| Root owns | 1,765 |
| User → root drop | 10.5% |
| User blood | 1h 11m 29s by xtk |
| Root blood | 2h 7m 42s by ethicxz |
Community difficulty votes:
| Bucket | Votes | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Brain Fuck | 674 | 44.9% |
| Ex Hard | 298 | 19.8% |
| Too Hard | 177 | 11.8% |
| Hard | 169 | 11.3% |
| Bit Hard | 49 | 3.3% |
Total votes: 1,502.
Is HTB PingPong hard?
PingPong is the best-established Insane on Hack The Box, at 4.7 from 151 reviews, a far heavier sample than TrustFall’s 4.8 from 22, and the difficulty histogram explains why nobody rated it lightly: 674 of 1,502 votes went to Brainfuck, another 298 to Extremely Hard. Two thirds of everyone who finished it called it harder than Insane.
The bloods back that up. User took xtk 1h11m, and root went to a different player, ethicxz, at 2h07m. Separate bloods on an Insane box usually mean the two halves need genuinely different skill sets.
Only 1,973 people have taken user, and 1,765 have root, a 10.5% drop.
A 4.7 rating alongside a Brainfuck-skewed histogram is the signature of a box that is hard on purpose and fair about it. Those are worth the week. Bring patience and a very good notes file.
What to have ready for PingPong
- 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 PingPong 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. PingPong is still live, so the writeup goes up the week it retires, in the same format as the HTB SecNotes 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 PingPong is still live.
Related writeups
Retired Windows boxes we’ve already published: