Yep thats all it took. 4 days in and I broke my machine somehow….. busy backing it up atm, so I thought it would be a good time to give an overview of my thoughts on this course.

So far its been an amazing course. I know I’m going to be reflecting the thoughts of others here but even if I don’t pass, the amount of info and the clarity of its presentation is simply top notch for the most part (a few videos went a bit fast for me, but so far its only been 1-2).

Futhermore, the extra mile challenges are actually quite a challenge. So far I have done all of them except for the DNS extra mile challenge, which I skipped because I was too tired to do it then…will have to come back to that one.

As for the actual exploiting part, I managed to get a few boxes on the first day, followed by 1-2 a day on Monday and Tuesday. From there its kinda stopped, and I now have about 6 boxes so far. The total number of boxes in the lab is about 45 or so, so I still have a long way to go.

One of the most interesting things about this course though is that although they don’t tell you how to exploit any of the machines, they do give you some help by walking you though how to do different enumeration techniques in the videos, before then asking you to perform these techniques in the labs. This makes for a very enjoyable experience as you get to learn how Mutts would go about doing it, and then your given the opportunity to recreate that in the lab. This helps to both learn the skills as well as increase the background knowledge that you will need for future penetration tests.

A common question asked when taking this course is how much programming language background one needs to take the course. Walking into this course I had some C++ and Python programming experience from my time doing exploit development as well as from going through the Grey Hat Python book, but I had no experience in Bash whatsoever. Whilst I do think one needs some Python experience to assist with going through the course smoothly, if your okay with doing some extra side research on Python and are okay looking things up, you could enter this course without any experience and still pass comfortably.

As knowledge of Bash programming, if you don’t know it don’t worry. So long as you know how to move around and do basic things in Linux, you will be fine. Honestly I didn’t know how the cut command worked at all, and Muts provided one of the best examples of it, and now I love using cut to simplify common tasks. Bash has sort of become my new best friend in a way.

Overall, very very good course. Unfortunately I can’t say much more as I’m only beginning module 6 and I don’t want to spoil the course for you guys who might be considering taking it.