Hack The Box Reactor Stats (Easy Linux)
HTB Reactor: retired easy Linux box, Season 11 week 1. Rated 4.2/5 from 1,136 reviews, 17,445 user owns. Final stats and prep, spoiler-free.
Reactor was week 1 of Hack The Box Season 11, an easy Linux machine by tejas3008, worth 20 points and 450 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 | 900 |
| Difficulty | Easy (20 pts / 450 XP) |
| OS | Linux |
| Released | 2026-05-23 (week 1) |
| Status | retired, between 2026-09-20 and 2026-11-09 |
| Maker | tejas3008 |
| Rating | 4.2 / 5 from 1,136 reviews |
| User owns | 17,445 |
| Root owns | 16,434 |
| User → root drop | 5.8% |
| User blood | 3m 31s by j88001 |
| Root blood | 7m 58s by dm0n3y |
Community difficulty votes:
| Bucket | Votes | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Easy | 5,415 | 39.5% |
| Too Easy | 2,737 | 20.0% |
| Very Easy | 2,124 | 15.5% |
| Cake | 1,644 | 12.0% |
| Medium | 1,059 | 7.7% |
Total votes: 13,710.
Difficulty read
Reactor was the season opener, and the participation numbers show it: 17,445 user owns, the highest of any box in Season 11 and about 13% clear of Connected, the next busiest at 15,438. Season openers always draw a crowd, but this one held it.
The community histogram agreed with the Easy label and then some: 75.0% of the 13,710 difficulty votes landed in Easy, Too Easy or Very Easy. Almost nobody argued it was harder than advertised.
The shape of the box was short. User blood fell in 3m31s, root at 7m58s, and only 5.8% of the people who got a shell failed to convert it to root. That combination of fast bloods and a small user-to-root drop means the privesc was a single step rather than a stage.
It retired with the lowest weighted difficulty of Season 11, 31.7 out of 100, and a 4.2 rating from 1,136 reviews: the friendliest entry of its season.
What to have ready
- 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 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. Reactor has retired, so the chain is clear to publish and the writeup goes up in the same format as the HTB Admirer 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: