Hack The Box TrustFall Stats (Insane Windows)
HTB TrustFall: active insane Windows box, 4.8/5 from 22 reviews, 181 user owns. Live stats, difficulty read and prep. Spoiler-free, no flags.
TrustFall is an active Hack The Box machine, an insane Windows box by EmSec and ctrlzero, released 2026-09-11 outside the seasonal rotation, worth 50 points and 1,365 XP. It has been live for nine 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 TrustFall at a glance
| Machine ID | 963 |
| Difficulty | Insane (50 pts / 1,365 XP) |
| OS | Windows |
| Released | 2026-09-11 |
| Status | active, nine days live |
| Makers | EmSec, ctrlzero |
| Rating | 4.8 / 5 from 22 reviews |
| User owns | 181 |
| Root owns | 167 |
| User → root drop | 7.7% |
| User blood | not recorded |
| Root blood | not recorded |
Community difficulty votes:
| Bucket | Votes | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Brain Fuck | 103 | 71.5% |
| Ex Hard | 14 | 9.7% |
| Too Hard | 12 | 8.3% |
| Medium | 6 | 4.2% |
| Hard | 4 | 2.8% |
Total votes: 144.
The box that was cancelled and then wasn’t
TrustFall was Season 11’s Insane. It was scheduled for 2026-08-15, the slot went empty for two Saturdays, and the season closed with BlockSynergy at a higher machine ID from a different maker. We wrote at the time that TrustFall never released.
It released on 2026-09-11, four weeks late and outside any season, which is why it carries no season points. The machine ID is still 963, below BlockSynergy’s 975, so it kept the slot it was built for.
One consequence: the API reports both bloods as HTB-Bot at zero seconds, which is the placeholder it uses when no blood was recorded rather than a real result. Nobody bled this box in the usual sense. The table above says “not recorded” because printing a zero-second blood would be inventing a fact.
Is HTB TrustFall hard?
It is the hardest-rated machine on the board by a distance. 103 of 144 votes, 71.5%, landed on Brainfuck. Add Extremely Hard and Too Hard and 89.5% of everyone who voted put it above the Insane label it ships with. Weighted across the ten buckets it scores 91.9 out of 100, ahead of Hercules at 88.5, which held that record until it retired last week.
181 user owns in nine days is the thinnest participation of anything currently live. For comparison, Management released a day later and has 1,510.
The 7.7% user-to-root drop is the one number that reads easy, and it is misleading: of 181 people who got a foothold, 167 finished. The filter on this box is the foothold, not the privesc. Almost nobody gets in, and almost everybody who does gets root.
Rating is 4.8 from 22 reviews, the highest on the board, but twenty-two reviews is not a settled opinion and the number will move. Take it as a strong early signal from a self-selected group rather than as a ranking.
EmSec also built DanglingTree and Scaffold; ctrlzero’s back catalogue runs through Timelapse, Outdated and Skyfall. The two co-authored Mirage before this.
What to have ready for TrustFall
- 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 TrustFall 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. TrustFall is still live, so the writeup goes up the week it retires, in the same format as the HTB Escape 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 TrustFall is still live.
Related writeups
Retired Windows boxes we’ve already published: