OverTheWire Bandit Part 2

OverTheWire Returns

In my last post, I walked us through connecting to OverTheWire's Bandit server, and completing level 0 and level 1. Following along with the previous article is a prerequisite to following this article, as you'll need to get the password from the file in level 1 first.

You can view my last post about this by following this link.

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OverTheWire Bandit Part 1

What is OverTheWire?

OverTheWire is a website with two games. One is "Wargames", which is a level based game, the other game is "Warzone", which is more of a free-for-all hacking game.

In this series of articles, I'm going to give a walkthrough of how to complete the "Bandit" series of levels on their website.

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Hack The Box Intro

Hack The Box

Hack The Box is a website that gives people a great place to test their penetration testing (hacking) skills. They have a selection of different machines available that are vulnerable to different types of attacks. This site uses the capture the flag scoring mechanism, where you hack machines, get a "flag" from them, and submit it to their site for points.

In this article, I'll cover how to make an account on HTB.

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Demystifying Lossless File Compression

The Idea

We all know the basic idea of file compression. We see ZIP files regularly, and know how to extract and compress them. Although most everyone knows how to use these compressed files, and understand that compressing files makes them smaller, most people have no idea how it works technically.

Though this may seem like magic, it's a fairly straightforward concept. In this article, we are going to be demystifying file compression.

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Deep Learning Neural Networks

What's all the frenzy around "neural networks"?

I keep seeing news about something awesome that a computer has been "trained" to do with "deep learning". These news spiels refer to something called "Q Learning", "Deep Learning Neural Networks", or "Hierarchical Learning".

Although these are huge terms, it's a pretty simple idea as to how they work. In this article, we cover some of the basics of this genre of algorithm.

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About Pseudo Random Number Generators

Random Numbers

Pseudo Random Number Generators, or PRNGs, are extremely important, as randomness is needed by computers for many purposes. As computers are "deterministic" machines, meaning they follow a specific procedure for everything, they are terrible at making randomness. Because of this, there has been an enormous amount of studying on how to simulate randomness on computers. The algorithms that are developed to simulate randomness are called PRNGs.

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