Learning together

Helen Keller once said: “Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much.”

Though maybe there are people, like me, who are struggling learning security, and IT in general, alone and would like to become study buddies or create a study group. Learning with someone is always much more interesting.

Anyways, if you are interested in learning with someone leave a comment below with a subject that you want to learn.
Best regards,
Ap4y

I think a study group is a good idea on paper. The forums can be looked at as sort of fulfilling this already, though. Did you have something else in mind?

Type your comment> @applebaps said:

I think a study group is a good idea on paper. The forums can be looked at as sort of fulfilling this already, though. Did you have something else in mind?

Well I look at the forum as a place where we can exchange ideas, views and give advice/hints, post learning materials and like you said in a sense it fulfills the idea. But by a study group I ment to create a group of people that would meet up (obviously online) to study a particular subject, report their findings, recommendations, do various tasks together, set up goals for each other, try to keep everyone motivated.

I think I’m more of a social learner that learns faster and stays motivated working with a person or a group. For me it’s a more productive choice plus by going over a specific subject with someone we can identify our learning gaps and fill them, not to mention making new friends along the way.

You can always form a team and work to get up the ranks.

I’m heavy invested right now in the privesc, but I’d like to learn more about the web app testing.
Once I’m on a machine, I can do a fair amount of damage in a reasonable time, but i’m struggling with the web-testing side of things.
I’m a lone wolf, though… study hardest when I have no-one around, and am far less easily satisfied than my customers.
But if someone is my counterpart, likes to study alone as well, and only needs a few pointers and is willing to give me some as well, I’d be happy to exchange information and see us grow to the best of both.

When it comes to web app, most resources are just plain basic and I’m struggling to find good resources on it.
A while back I picked up the ‘the hackers playbook 2’, got the feeling I learn more spending half a day on this website than reading that book for a couple of days. Seem intermediate level at most.

I want to get to the hard and insane machines here and I’m wondering what’s a sensible route to that… Most books seem outdated or intermediate at most. Even an oscp doesn’t seem to go past an intermediate level.

Anyone has any hints in this department?

Type your comment> @gnothiseauton said:

You can always form a team and work to get up the ranks.

I’m heavy invested right now in the privesc, but I’d like to learn more about the web app testing.
Once I’m on a machine, I can do a fair amount of damage in a reasonable time, but i’m struggling with the web-testing side of things.
I’m a lone wolf, though… study hardest when I have no-one around, and am far less easily satisfied than my customers.
But if someone is my counterpart, likes to study alone as well, and only needs a few pointers and is willing to give me some as well, I’d be happy to exchange information and see us grow to the best of both.

When it comes to web app, most resources are just plain basic and I’m struggling to find good resources on it.
A while back I picked up the ‘the hackers playbook 2’, got the feeling I learn more spending half a day on this website than reading that book for a couple of days. Seem intermediate level at most.

I want to get to the hard and insane machines here and I’m wondering what’s a sensible route to that… Most books seem outdated or intermediate at most. Even an oscp doesn’t seem to go past an intermediate level.

Anyone has any hints in this department?

Yeah but first I need to find people who want to be in a team with me xd

I wouldn’t mind to help you out from time to time but I’m a beginner so there would be not much help from me.

In my position I think it would be best to find someone who is a begginer too 'couse in that way we will grow on the same pace

Hey there,

I had the exact same idea in my mind but never throw it on public :wink:
However, there might be some problems in such attempt - the time.
And it’s not even about time zones, but rather more about how different people organize their time. It might be hard to fit schedule of each other.
Moreover, there’s a question on resources. Solving boxes here in group doesn’t make much sense to me.

I’d be happy to join initiative so throw ur ideas :wink:

@Nism0
If people want to learn together everything is possible, it’s just the hassle of planning things out.
It’s not just solving boxes together it’s more of like a group study where people can gather ask questions, help in solving things, give advice, in general filling other knowledge gaps and your own.
I’m still becoming a script kiddie and trying to do challenges without watching a walkthrough, maybe by just reading stuff online that might be relevant and sitting on the forum, but it still takes me a long time to solve anything.

My idea would be maybe just gather for 1-2h in a week, give each other tasks, talk about things study one subject together, try to explain what we learned and etc. It’s just a simple study group

Started learning reverse engineering, there are tons of information and I got a bit lost. I know that without assembly language I won’t go far so started learning assembly on my own.
There is a saying “two heads are better than one”. We can minimise the time spent learning if we communicate with each other.

I know this doesn’t really solve your question of studying together, but the good thing about reverse engineering and assembly is that the basics don’t change that much. About 15 years ago, I spend days on end in Soft ice for those who still know that. The same principles still apply today. The point is: just about any tutorial about reverse engineering you can get your hands on has a very high likelihood of being relevant today, even if it’s 20 years old.

What can help a lot is crackme’s: a friend of mine and myself we used to write programs and the other one had to crack it, then we switched roles. So we basically stepped up our game with each round and gradually learned how code was translated and obfuscated in assembler.
It helps a lot to write simple stuff and see how it looks in assembler.
Back in those days I also did some assembler programming, writing simple functions like ‘making a letter appear on a screen’ or ‘drawing a line’ (which ain’t too easy by the way considering it’s just a simple line) and later writing keygens.
When it comes to crackmes there are (or at least we’re back then) a ton of sites that arranged them in order of complexity.
The good thing is in the more basic ones, you’ll often learn one principle and the write ups explain it. If you like that style of learning: practical and hands on, with pretty direct rewards that gradually get harder as you go. Then that may be a good path to go.

Assembler is insane when it comes to it’s simplicity and still how much you can do with it, but the main point is: here, more then in any other domain, don’t confuse ‘basic’ for ‘simple’: understanding the simple and most basic mechanisms is the game you need to play if you ask me. Assembled is just that: really simple instructions resulting in an insane amount of complexity.

I’d advice against trying to start with big programs and to put things in perspective: in the case of assembler even a simple notepad is big… not a whole lot of people on this planet could write a simple notepad with in bare assembler today. We tend to take thing like ‘writing to a file’ for granted, but in assembled that’s another ballgame… it sure ain’t two lines of code, probably closer to 60 or 70.

Find small things, like crackme’s or challenges and start from there, you’ll advance way faster than trying to solve big problems.
It’s absolutely useless trying to break say an armadillo where mirror processes guard whatever you do to the main binary and try to trip you up on every step of the way, if you can’t understand the basic stuff.

If you like the more pentest-side of things, machines like node or October are worth checking out. Certainly node is nice because it opens doors if you understand the binary and it’s well readable.

I’m rusty on the subject, and back then I only did a lot of windows reversing, but if you have specific questions, you can always ask them in the forums and I’ll try my best to reply if I can.