Category Archive

This is a fast post just to say that I’m alive and that I’ll post as soon as I end with exams. I don’t tend to follow memes in fact I dislike them but I’ll follow this one from tenak since I found it quite interesting It’s about “The 10 commands you use more oftenly”.

ahm@revy: ~$ history|awk '{print $2}'|awk 'BEGIN {FS="|"} {print $1}'|sort|uniq -c|sort -rn|head -10
110 gcc
100 cd
51 ll
28 vim
28 gpg
23 mplayer-bin
12 feh
12 rm
10 youtube-dl
10 time

For us who like computers there’s something called wargames. A wargame is a set of challenges usually organized by different difficulty levels in where you have to solve as many challs as possible just for the fact of fun. It’s a good way to spend your spare time (if you have) and it also helps you to check your knowledge and learn new things apart of improving your analytical skills.

Wargaming sites tend to have different types of challenges in, some are exclusively dedicated to one kind of challange. There are different kinds of challanges:

• Web and shell based ones may be the most interesting from my point of view since this are the ones that look more realistic. In this you either break into some restricted area, check for some admin slovenliness, etc (web) or have to scale privileges exploiting some bugged programs launched by users with higher privileges (shell).
• At cryptography ones as you might guess you’re given a cryptogram, sometimes few hints, and you just have to guess the ciphering method, decrypt it and find the “secret word/message”.
• Coding challenges consist of an enunciate describing you an algorithm/process and you have to code a tool that does it. Several coding challenges sites check the efficiency of the algorithm by checking the time elapsed and the resources used.
• Steganography challenges consist of a file, usually an image, in which like cryptograms you have to find secret words/messages. This tend to be harder than cryptograms it’s recommended to have some hex editors around.
• I think it’s quite obvious what you have to do with Cracking ones, you have to crack or reverse engineer the binary in order to get the algorithm that makes the keys valid then get the magic word, code a keygen, a patch, etc, that depends.

Often wargaming sites include logic and science games as a complement for the other challenges. Some others also include tests where you can check your knowledge and might also improve your gathering skills.

This is a list of the wargames I used to play, I play or ever planned to:

http://yoire.com
http://bright-shadows.net
http://intruded.net
http://quiz.ngsec.com
http://hackquest.de
http://pulltheplug.org
http://osix.net
http://www.programming-challenges.com
http://smashthestack.org
http://mathschallenge.net