Phase 1 done: 8 weeks of pentesting, what I'd do differently
Eight weeks, two GitHub projects, a 69% quiz, and two weeks where I clearly dropped the ball. End of phase 1, unfiltered review.
6 weeks of pentesting: what I still didn't know
31/45 on the quiz. Six weeks of work and I still confused filtered with closed. Here are the gaps I found in my fundamentals, and how I fixed them.
I coded my own nmap (a much simpler one)
One socket, one loop, and 1024 ports scanned in seconds. What I understood by building a port scanner from scratch instead of just running nmap.
Eight ways I learned to get root on a Linux box
I thought privilege escalation was about finding the right exploit. Turns out it's mostly about reading what was misconfigured and asking: who forgot about this?
The fake `ls` that read a password
A SUID binary, a missing absolute path, and a fake `ls`. How I got a password the program wasn't supposed to share.
The file named - that froze my terminal
My first real stumble on Bandit. What a file named `-` taught me about how the shell actually works.