@solid5n4k3 said:
When I started HTB, I needed time to get familiar with HTB methodology, what is needed from machine etc, you know what I want to tell you.
Totally agree. There is a genuine learning curve. My first year here I was lucky to get one box every two weeks. Practice makes perfect.
However - my caveat (and I am only playing Devils Advocate really) is that people have different starting points. If someone has spent a long time on THM and VulnHub, they will hit the ground running a lot faster than someone who has never used nmap before.
Maybe I am slow in learning or something else, but when I see that someone in two weeks do what I mentioned in first post, seems impossible for me.
Don’t get me wrong, it is very suspicious. They are either experienced and would be doing well on other platforms, or they’ve acquired walkthroughs.
While for example 2 insane and 3 hard boxes which are active now, and done by users in short period of time, have totally different approaches and technologies, for one to know all of that, he/she has to have such broad experience, knowledge or just better search engine than I am :).
lol. I agree with the underlying point you are making here but I would also suggest a general caution of comparing yourself with others.
I’ll use myself as an example - Laboratory. The person who got root blood is currently ranked Pro Hacker in the 600s here, I am in and out of the 100s. They got root in 2 hours. It took me about 8 to get user and then about an hour to root it. The person who got user blood did it in under 2 hours but they are also in the 600s. They are clearly MUCH better at some things than I am, I just have persistence and spare time on my side.
The point is that everyone has different capabilities. Its a bit misleading to think “I’d have struggled with that, so other people should.”
Saying all that, I agree with you, it is unusual and suspicious
And totally doesn’t make sense to have fake points on platform like this, since we are here to learn not to compete.
I agree ten million percent here. Its a shame that some organisations appear to be turning this into a way to select new hires because that is always going to drive “cheating.” It is the same with certifications - the rampant cheating on OSCP led to them using video monitoring for example.
Life and world is full of competition so some award and who has more points has to exist.
Humans seem to be fascinated with badges.