Recap

Last week we went over some Bandit Labs challenges. No one got past Bandit Labs 16. And everyone learned a good bit. I have the writeups on the first 11 challenges linked in this doc

NCL

You should Compete! Last fall I thought I wasn't good enough to compete and so I didn't sign up. I massively regretted it! For one, all of my friends had this cool experience competing together and I didn't, and second, I would have actually done pretty well in the competition since I already had experience in CDCTF. Also when I competed in the spring, I would have done even better if I had already done it once. The competition is a little different from CDCTF. It's organized by categories and the challenges are designed to build up your skills progressively. You can learn how to do the challenge, by just doing it. The fundamental skill of CTFs is perseverance. Everything you learn, you will have not known right up until you learned it. Every challenge is impossible, until you crack it. NCL is nice because you can use skills from one challenge on the next one you solve. Sign up here

SSH

If this is your first week, you will need to SSH in to the server. The 0th Challenge is just to ssh in. This should be available on Mac, it certainly will be on Windows and Linux systems. You will need to open up your terminal and man ssh to figure out how to connect. The only nonstandard part here is that the ssh is on port 2220 instead of the default 22

This Week

We're going to continue with last weeks work. Bandit Labs is a beginner friendly hacker challenge designed to get you some hands on experience with Linux and with solving challenges. We are going to run through the levels and. These challenges will only work if you read the Descriptions and investigate the hints you are given. I will help you out with some guidance when you get stuck but it's going to be on you to Understand the challenges. I have made Write-ups on the first 11 challenges which you can follow if you get absolutely stuck but don't lean on them too heavily or you won't learn the key skill from the challenge.

Writeups

Bandit Labs 1 Bandit Labs 2 Bandit Labs 3 Bandit Labs 4 Bandit Labs 5 Bandit Labs 6 Bandit Labs 7 Bandit Labs 8 Bandit Labs 9 Bandit Labs 10 Bandit Labs 11

Next Time

Check Up

What's been exciting to you so far? What have you learned? What did you already know? What did you not like?

Moving Forward

More Bandit Labs? Do you want me to focus on Linux as a tool or as a phenomenon. Would you like to learn how to use Linux to hack things or how to hack Linux? There is a lot going on behind the scenes that keeps everything working. So far we have touched on the basic navigability and software aspects which you will need for either pursuit, but now you must decide where you want to focus?