Type your comment> @0x29A said:
For example, if someone wasted six hours digging through an ISO, maybe they’ll think twice about doing that again next time they run across one and mark it low priority. Maybe they’ll take note about what the ISO contains (could be a hint) and just continue on. Maybe they’ll learn how to
md5orsha1the ISO file and see if it’s a stock image. If it’s not, maybe they’ll learn how todiffthe ISO file with a stock ISO so they aren’t forced to dig around the entire thing.Similar lessons may be learned from just about any rabbit hole.
Look at IppSec’s videos and how quickly he dismisses most rabbit holes. You think he does that in practice? I do. How do you think he learned such intuition?
Regarding things like login rabbit holes: at each layer in the hacking process, you should follow the standard steps. The first being recon. For example if you see a login form half way through your recon process and you immediately start hitting it with a brute force, you’ve just violated modus operandi. It’s not until that doesn’t even work that you continue your recon…so why not have continued that in the first place in order to gather all of the puzzle pieces? I like to call them “dots.” Once you have all the dots, you’ll have the beginning of your attack surface graph. You can start performing more systematic research on each of their attack vectors, forming relationships with other dots, and determine routes to your final goal. Finally, you can map out the shortest cost, least noisy, shortest path, etc to reach your goal. Most, if not all, of the rabbit holes at this point will be obvious in your graph.
Learning how to be pragmatic and how to frame your problems accordingly may not always save you time, but it will save you the headache of guessing and working with unknowns and eventually dissolve your reliance on script kiddie tools and methodologies. Most importantly (imho), it will make you quieter in real life encounters.
Edit: Slightly off-topic rant: To all of the cheaters out there: This is a learned skill. A talent. An art. And it’s required. If you request help from someone and they provide a spoiler, either discard it or learn from it, don’t live by it, and certainly don’t pass it on. If you must (e.g. team member, close friend, or something), explain to them what you learned from it rather than just copying & pasting the solution, because that does neither party any good. Plus, spending the extra ten minutes it takes to digest the solution and explaining it to yourself and then to your friend will totally be worth it, trust me. For example: Someone asked me for help on a simple binary exploitation. I could’ve just pasted him my ~50 byte payload and maybe tried to answer some questions following that, but instead I took 20 minutes out of my day and wrote a fairly detailed write-up specifically for him on how it was done. It taught him how to do it, I learned a couple things merely explaining each individual step, and if he ends up sharing it, so be it… there’s no copy & paste solution, just reading material for others. Sure there’s a leader board, but we don’t – shouldn’t be measuring epeens here, we’re all intellectuals. We should all think of ourselves as students and teachers. Do your part in the community. Learn together!
This is gold!!!