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Bluesman's avatar
Bluesman
Icon for Bronze II rankBronze II
20 days ago

Question for members: your most rebellious labs

Hello!,

I think it would be interesting to share in this Community those labs that have been the most difficult for us to complete; or those that are resisting us and we have invested a significant amount of time: trying tactics and techniques, reading carefully their documentation and references, blog posts about the exploits, testing options or just going step by step.

Let's get started :)!:

.: I find it hard to finish labs related to access policies or permissions in Cloud: maybe it's the syntax required to give permission to a S3 bucket or to the access point ... but I invest a lot of time to complete them. I am close to having finished 2,400 labs but when I have to write the concrete policy in that json file I struggle :).

.: Esoteric labs, as I like to call them ^^. Example: CAN bus. Don't ask me the specific reason, but I have been trying for some time to finish the last few!: I love them, but I'm stuck at the moment.

[...]

So: which are the labs you have had the hardest time finishing (no matter the difficulty) and which are the ones you are investing the most time in?.

Thank you and good luck!.

  • puuuh.. after completing 2500+ labs here's my list of "struggles" :)

    • the "Ethereum - Smart Contracts" Challenge, because I went to it with no clue about blockchain and there's no learning path to learn something about it
    • Erik McClements: Linux Filesystem Race Conditions - took me a lot of time. I was able to find the file I've need to tacke, but then I invested a lot into y .c code, I've developped but somehow it just didn't wanted to work. 
    • Python Scripting for Malware Analysis: Ep.5 – Code Obfuscation took me also quite some time, because somehow my routines didn't wanted to work at all and I've not trusted the code in Ghidra
    • Pen Test CTFs: Blind SQL Injection - there I've invested hours in a practical script helping me (sqlmap was missing!) and the SQL injection was quite nasty
    • DFIR CTF: LightNeuron DLL i've started this lab, I dont know, 100 times over a timespan of almost one year. Then i've clicked probably - to solve it - 1000 times on "next step" while watching all registers and possible memory locations to see my first data decoded.... then the lab crashed... and I had to do it all over again :)
    • Threat Research: Darkside.dll – Deobfuscation was not so bad, I had a lot of fun. My antivirus protection too. My deobfuscation script I've wrote seemed to use some strings/bytes which triggered my AV to alert all the time (i've saved the final script to solve the lab in my notes). And it also alerted my companys CSIRT/CERT team which triggered me "please explain why you do handle malware on your pc" - about 4 times. 

    But in general: Most of the labs in the "Challenges & Scenarios" generated the most fun but also the biggest learning curve to me as I needed to do a lot of research.

  • TillyCorless's avatar
    TillyCorless
    Icon for Community Manager rankCommunity Manager

    Hey Bluesman

    What a great conversation opener!

    Without giving too much away, we might be launching a community Study Group in the very near future. It sounds like it could be of interest to you. Details to follow! 👀