Hack The Box Stream Stats (Medium Linux)
HTB Stream: Season 12 week 3, a medium Linux box by 7u9y. 2.4/5 from 323 reviews, the lowest on the board, and 3,368 user owns. Live stats, spoiler-free.
Stream is week 3 of Hack The Box Season 12, a medium Linux machine by 7u9y, worth 30 points and 845 XP. It went live at 19:00 UTC on 2026-10-10 and has been up for 18 days, so these are settled numbers rather than release-night ones. No chain, no flags.
HTB Stream at a glance
| Machine ID | 990 |
| Difficulty | Medium (30 pts / 845 XP) |
| OS | Linux |
| Released | 2026-10-10 (Season 12, week 3) |
| Status | active, 18 days live |
| Maker | 7u9y |
| Rating | 2.4 / 5 from 323 reviews |
| User owns | 3,368 |
| Root owns | 3,263 |
| User → root drop | 3.1% |
| User blood | 20m 10s by admiin |
| Root blood | 20m 12s by admiin |
Community difficulty votes:
| Bucket | Votes | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Medium | 661 | 30.1% |
| Bit Hard | 401 | 18.3% |
| Hard | 364 | 16.6% |
| Too Easy | 208 | 9.5% |
| Too Hard | 151 | 6.9% |
Total votes: 2,193.
Is HTB Stream hard?
Harder than its label, by the votes. Weighted across the ten buckets from Cake to Brainfuck, the 2,193 votes land on 56.8 out of 100, the highest of any Medium Linux box on the live board. Medium is still the largest single bucket, but Bit Hard, Hard and Too Hard together hold 916 votes, 41.8% of the total, against 208 for Too Easy.
The rating is the number that stands out. 2.4 from 323 reviews is the lowest on the board by almost a full star: the next lowest is Connected at 3.3. With that many reviews it is not noise. Players finish Stream and do not enjoy it.
They do finish it. Of 3,368 players with user, 3,263 have root, a 3.1% drop. admiin, who also took first user on Scaffold and Paperwork, took both bloods two seconds apart, at 20m10s and 20m12s. Put those together with the votes and the shape is a foothold that costs time and a privesc that barely registers.
7u9y has seven machines on HTB, all Linux: Analytics, Devvortex, Strutted, Silentium, Enigma, Nexus and now Stream. Five of the seven are Easy. Enigma sits at 4.4 on the same board Stream sits at 2.4, so the low rating is about this box, not the maker.
What to have ready for Stream
- Full TCP sweep, then UDP on the top 100. Mediums are where a forgotten SNMP or TFTP service starts mattering.
- Add the hostname to
/etc/hoststhe moment you see a redirect, then enumerate every vhost. On this tier the foothold usually lives on a name you have to find. - 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.
- Budget your time for the foothold. The votes and the two-second blood gap both say that is where Stream spends it.
- Privesc:
sudo -l,linpeas, then group membership, then anything in/optthat someone wrote themselves.
When the Stream 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. Stream is still live, so the writeup goes up the week it retires, in the same format as the HTB OnlyForYou 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 Stream is still live.
Related writeups
Retired medium Linux boxes we’ve already published: