help with A Christmas Catastrophe: A Letter to Santa

When we did the lab, although we had to do some web-fu to get the initial foothold, once we were on the box (with meterpreter), we found a local vulnerability that could be popped to priv esc up to root and grab the token. We didn't do anything clever with the cron stuff. I have no idea if this is how they intended you to do the lab, or if we missed something clever. 

One minor headache though - sometimes metasploit's local_exploit_suggester script reported that the vuln was there, sometimes it did not. 

Good luck! :-)