Merry Hack-mas!

Merry Christmas! I hope you are able to spend a restful time with friends or family this holiday season.

As for hacking-related gifts, my wife got me the v2 release of RTFM: Red Team Field Manual by Ben Clark and Nick Downer. It’s packed full of the exact commands and tools used by ethical hackers.

The 2022 edition has been expanded from the original 2014 version, and includes a more detailed table of contents.

The RTFM is a well organized book. The detailed table of contents is easy to scan a glance, and includes sections for each OS (Windows, Linux, MacOS), as well as for particular technology exploits (network, web, database) or tools (like nmap).

Check it out on Amazon if you’re curious!

A Hackful December - Advent of Cyber 2023

One consistent bit of hacking I did this December was the TryHackMe - Advent of Cyber 2023 challenge. In past years, I had started cyber challenges, but for one reason or another, never got all the way through. Not this year!

What is Advent of Cyber 2023?

The Advent of Cyber Challenge is a month-long event organized by TryHackMe, a popular hands-on cybersecurity training platform. It’s like an advent calendar, but instead of chocolate, you get hacking challenges each day.

The challenges are beginner-friendly and cover a wide range of cybersecurity topics. You get to play with many things… from machine learning challenges (including a ChatGPT-like exploit) to DevSecOps challenges (hijacking application builds) to disk and memory forensics, and more! The entire challenge is free for anyone, and TryHackMe provides everything you need to complete the challenges, and a video walkthrough in case you get stuck.

My Favourite Challenge

I think my favourite challenge of all was Day 6 (Memory corruption) - Memories of Christmas Past.

In this challenge, there is a minigame that you need to play in order to buy a star for the Christmas tree.

At first, you start out by playing the game normally, but then realize that by having your name changed in game, that corrupts the neighboring memory for your “coins” amount. Building on this, you corrupt different parts of the game memory to accomplish different goals. It’s great fun!

If you have some time over the holidays, and want to learn some new things… check it out!