When last we left our student, he was stuck on an exercise at PentesterLab PRO. The exerise was the last AUTHO in the list. Two weekends straight were rough, and he finally broke down and started speaking of himself in the third person. Or contacted support to determine whether the exercise itself was broken, or something else was wrong with his understanding.
He… ahem… *I* got a response, and I kicked myself repeatedly after I received it. I did nothing wrong, other than spell the word wrong. There’s a distinct difference in how the word for the parameter is spelled in American English vs. European English. In America, we spell it with a “z” before the “ation.” The exercise uses the European spelling, and while my brain read it fine, when I went to type in the parameter into either mitmproxy or Burp Suite, I Americanized it,every… single… time.
My boss has a habit of copy/pasting most everything. His keyboard skills for highlighting the bits he wants to select, copying, then moving to the line he wants to modify, and pasting in things like Google Mail, and Docs are beyond me. I have to move my hand to the mouse, and that bothers me. I also type somewhere between 70 and 90 WPM on a good day, so I often just type instead.
I should listen to my boss more often. I should learn some of this keyboard tricks. I probably won’t, but I should.
I was so frustrated with myself over this that I didn’t touch the labs again until Sunday. I did one exercise to force myself to progress, and I’ll probably work on it more during the week, this week, but for now I only progressed by five exercises. The last AUTHO and the first four CODEXEC (code execution) exercises were all I managed, this week.
I did let myself get distracted by some of my non-tech hobbies, though. I put a couple of plants in the ground, purchased my copy of “The Great American Farm Tour” (GAFT) from Abundant Permaculture, and watched some videos from the purchase.
My focus this year is still UnixSecLab, and getting my OSCP is a hug part of that. I’m still not completely abandoning Jack of all Hobbies, though, and I’m getting ideas for next year so I can ramp up operations for it. Until then, all posts will be here, and the other will just lie dormant.
Next week, I should have much more progress to report. Thanks for sticking with me through my journey.