A Script Kiddie’s guide to Passing OSCP on your first attempt.

@m0zzare11a said:
Excellent writeup. Congrats on passing!

Thank you!

@Blu3wolf said:
Congratulations of passing you just motivate another one that it can be done.
but as you wrote Time and hard study is the secret here !
Thanks 4 your post !

Thank you! Im glad you see it as motivation!

Excellent. I’m also a father of two in a sysadmin / engineer role so it’s especially salient.
Thanks.

i failed my first attempt only got 25 points means BOF :frowning:

Thank you for sharing your experience here. Very insightful and encouraging!

Many congratulations on passing the exam!! A nicely written article, which has cleared my mind a lot, and I am having a breath of relief ? I’ve been freaking out since I registered for the PWK, but now thanks to you I am feeling a bit relaxed… I’m a script kiddie too here, but i’ve pwned all the vulnhub VMs in abatchy’s blog, and a few more as well…

Nice,this is valuable information indeed.
Thank you for sharing sir.

Thank you for this awesome write up!

Sir, i’ve a question. While doing my OSCP, can i use nmap vulner to scan for CVE then access into it’s script. instead of using metasploit to automate. i “kiddie script” manually. in this situtation do i need to cite the source of the script (probably with screenshots or whatever means)? and will i fail the exam?

Another question… As I’m browsing thru the ocsp report template. Section 3.4 House cleaning : after collecting trophies from the exam network was completed, the student removed all user account and passwords as well as the meterpreter services installed on the system. Offensive security should not have to remove any user accounts or services from the system.

Does this means once done must clean up as it originally is?

.

Type your comment> @SlaCk3rxD said:

Another question… As I’m browsing thru the ocsp report template. Section 3.4 House cleaning : after collecting trophies from the exam network was completed, the student removed all user account and passwords as well as the meterpreter services installed on the system. Offensive security should not have to remove any user accounts or services from the system.

Does this means once done must clean up as it originally is?

Hi,
For the first question: exam guide have explicit manual about this. If you wrote a script or made any changes to existent script you should provide a link to the source code and include all the code into the report and highlight the changes.
Nmap itself and its scripting engine is fully permitted on the exam, there are no restrictions like msf/meterpreter

For the second question: you do not need to delete all the traces in the exam network. This section is more like awareness about your future reports to the real customers

Hi @3XsAGbKHsb7FPY as I read somewhere before. Oscp only allow us to use msf/meterpreter once in the whole exam. Okay good to know there’s no need to cleanup. Otherwise it will be a waste of time… Thanks!

thx!

Gr8 Write-up with motivation and achieving set goal. if we buy 90 days material and go through properly. will it be enough to take exam and pass? ( if good on networking, linux). how did you manage step by step recording of each steps during exam. which os you are allowed to connect? other than oscp what you recommend for quick notes and review before an exam?

Thank you for sharing! I’m going to be attempting my OSCP exam soon so this is definitely helpful.

Did my 2nd attempt on OSCP yesterday.
The first time, I got problems with the BoF-challange, which took me 6 hours, after that i was stressed and collecte aprox 60 points allover, in 18 hours.

I had a cooldown period for 3 months (self decided, as the labs kind of burned me out, my girlfriend complained about me not being around with my son).

This 2nd time around,
I got 50 points in 2 hours, had 90 (given that i only acccess local.txt and its worth half value) points within 6 hours.

Pretty great to have such amount of time left and be able to use it to write the report, retake screenshots that looks strange in your report and such.

Let’s just hope I pass :>

So I ended up failing my first OSCP attempt, which I know isn’t a bad thing. It just means I need more practice. I looked over the list of OSCP-type boxes suggested from NetSec/TJ Null, and I feel I should start there to get more experience before even attempting again. I managed to pass the BOF challenge in the exam, which I had no issues with.

I also learned that familiarizing myself with programming/scripting languages such as Python and C will be of benefit to me since the exploits I’ve ran into had me guessing some of the time of what it did, which I know isn’t a good place to be at.

Anywho, just thought I’d share my experience, it was difficult but I’ll try again at some point.

Type your comment> @q8cloud said:

Gr8 Write-up with motivation and achieving set goal. if we buy 90 days material and go through properly. will it be enough to take exam and pass? ( if good on networking, linux). how did you manage step by step recording of each steps during exam. which os you are allowed to connect? other than oscp what you recommend for quick notes and review before an exam?

Sorry for the late reply. It really depends on your experience and how much time you have to dedicate to it. If you can spend time after-work every day plus the weekend, and feel ready… then you should go for it. I personally didn’t have all that time with kids so I didn’t take the test after 9 months.

@extincted said:
Did my 2nd attempt on OSCP yesterday.
The first time, I got problems with the BoF-challange, which took me 6 hours, after that i was stressed and collecte aprox 60 points allover, in 18 hours.

I had a cooldown period for 3 months (self decided, as the labs kind of burned me out, my girlfriend complained about me not being around with my son).

This 2nd time around,
I got 50 points in 2 hours, had 90 (given that i only acccess local.txt and its worth half value) points within 6 hours.

Pretty great to have such amount of time left and be able to use it to write the report, retake screenshots that looks strange in your report and such.

Let’s just hope I pass :>

You will, don’t rush and give yourself time to absorb, learn, rinse and repeat. Then go for the exam. Every box I failed to pwn in htb and vulnhub I wrote down where I failed and created a list of “have you tried these techniques” to help me remember.