What Is OverTheWire

Omer included in Misc

2021-02-09 666 words 4 minutes

Contents

What is OverTheWire

Overthewire is a really good resource for someone really new to cybersecurity to learn about cybersecurity. It has a hands on approach of teaching things. It has what I call Seasons. These so called Seasons are not actually numbered but rather named, and each season has an episode. At least that’s how I imagine it in my head.

Each season teaches a different cybersecurity concept. For example season 1 (Bandit) teaches about the Linux Operating System. And the way they do it is awesome. You don’t even have to install any kind of Linux on your system or use virtual machine. They already have setup a remote server for you, you just have to login using ssh and you’re good to go.

As my eagerness to learn the hacking was starting to grow I had no idea where to go or where to start. Hacking was, and still is considered a very bad thing in my society so this might also have its own effects. I was always watching this youtube videos and reading on how to hack Facebook or Gmail and these were big deal at that time. But after a while they become redundant. And I had no new knowledge to acquire from them and it started to be boring.

After doing these for a while, as I said it was boring, I hear the term script kiddie being used a lot. By further investigating this term I realized I’m a script kiddie So my next journey became to be a real hacker not a script kiddie. I even had Kali linux installed on flash drive as persistence and would flex on some of my friends I also installed Kali linux on my main and only laptop it was not long after that I realized it was a bad idea so I removed kali and installed Ubuntu and Distro hopped a lot, that’s a story for another time.

After I Googled around How not to be script kiddie every blogpost I read was telling me to learn a programming language and every one was recommending python, so I started to learn python. The main resource I used at that time were the website codecademy.com, and “Learn python the hard way by Zed A. Shaw”

I didn’t stop there it was around this time that I had to go to collage. I decided I was going to learn Software Engineering because I loved computers duh. In my first and second year of collage I had acquired knowledge in many languages like php, javascirpt, java, C, C++ and so on. But I was no where near becoming a hacker, spoiler alert I’m still no where near became one.

While all this was happening I had a book I set aside and procrastinated a lot to read. One day I was sitting in my dorm and I was really bored and looking around my filesystem, and I stumbled upon this book I was setting aside for long time. The book goes by the title “Hacking: The Art of Exploitation, 2nd Edition, by Jon Erickson”. I can not tell you how much I loved it. This book opened a whole new world of hacking to me I was fascinated. By reading this book and seeking more knowledge about the terms and techniques and wanting to know more I had to dig up on the Internet for more knowledge and oh boy oh boy I was bookmarking a site after site a book after book. That how I stumbled upon overthewire too.

I think this post is being too long so I will stop here and share with you all the resources like youtube channels, websites and Blogs that you can go to learn hacking. This list will grow as I obtain more resources.

Books:

Serious Cryptography, A practical Introduction to Modren Encryption by Jean Philippe Aumasson
The art of software security assessment
Practical malware analysis

Links: