Why do people say “rooted, easy” even when they say in the same comment they used a hint? I believe that using a hint from the discussion means you didn’t do the box yourself.? what are your opinions
Could be any reason.
Why do the ones who go 1-22 in team games say “gg ez” after a win like they did anything?
Could have been easy with the hint.
Could be objectively easy and they looked over something obvious.
Or they could just want random people on the internet to think they’re smarter than they are.
No point thinking about it.
@HcKy said:
Could be any reason.
Why do the ones who go 1-22 in team games say “gg ez” after a win like they did anything?Could have been easy with the hint.
Could be objectively easy and they looked over something obvious.Or they could just want random people on the internet to think they’re smarter than they are.
No point thinking about it.
Well said. +Respect.
@eilambiran said:
Why do people say “rooted, easy”
As others have said, many reasons. Some people find boxes easier than others. If Person A finds a box easy and B finds it hard, it doesn’t mean A is better than B. I know people who can reverse engineer binaries in their sleep but struggle with some basic web app enumeration.
I certainly wouldn’t let it bother me that someone else thought a box was easy but I thought it was hard. APT is an example of this, I enjoyed it, but I found it was a really hard box. Other people have said it was an easy box.
even when they say in the same comment they used a hint?
Maybe they mean that with the hint everything became clear.
I believe that using a hint from the discussion means you didn’t do the box yourself.? what are your opinions
I strongly disagree with this, but everyone has different views. It’s a bit like saying if you use ropshell.com you didn’t find the ROP yourself (or the frequent discussion about metasploit vs manual exploit). Everything we do builds on knowledge provided by others and it shouldn’t be seen as a bad thing.
The other reasons I disagree are:
- It feeds into the mindset which makes people want to say a box was easy. No one knows if you read the forum, no one (other than the person you asked) knows if you asked for help in a DM. No one knows if you read a walkthrough. So having the idea that “doing the box yourself” means something to anyone other than you, is a bit misleading.
- For me, HTB is a platform for people to learn and practice. If you no longer need any assistance, awesome. But given the variety of challenges on HTB boxes, if someone can do all 20 live boxes without any help (and by help I mean googling how to do it), I’d suspect they were in a genuine minority.
People should be working to improve their knowledge and learning constantly. Part of that is pushing themselves to complete boxes with as little help as possible but it isn’t always a realistic goal. Creating a “pass/fail” mindset related to it is very likely to lead to frustration and defeat.
Also, in 99% of cases, security is a team sport. I’ve seen hundreds of pentests and thousands of incident response sessions and never once seen the process end without someone asking for help/guidance/advice or second opinions.
“If you are the smartest person in the room, you’re in the wrong room”
The fact that there are people better than me here who still need hints to solve these “easy” boxes, and yet more who are actually able to provide them, means I am in the right room. My perspective.
If you are here only for puzzle solving and the thrill of solving it in a way that feels like you did it all “yourself” (with TazWake’s points about that), then I can see how those type of posts might put you off.
For people that are here to learn and for whom the puzzle itself is not the end they are building toward, it’s more efficient to ask for help around the time when the keyboard imprints on your forehead seem like they aren’t going away.
Type your comment> @svenkali said:
“If you are the smartest person in the room, you’re in the wrong room”
The fact that there are people better than me here who still need hints to solve these “easy” boxes, and yet more who are actually able to provide them, means I am in the right room. My perspective.
If you are here only for puzzle solving and the thrill of solving it in a way that feels like you did it all “yourself” (with TazWake’s points about that), then I can see how those type of posts might put you off.
For people that are here to learn and for whom the puzzle itself is not the end they are building toward, it’s more efficient to ask for help around the time when the keyboard imprints on your forehead seem like they aren’t going away.
+Respect for svenkali. HackTheBox is a penetration testing-testing platform. Yes, there are veterans among us, heck, they are the among the class of hackers that wrote the walk-throughs for gods sake, but most of us are fumbling our way through and learning as we go.
I watched tonnes of youtube videos on how to get into ethical hacking, and honestly they were pointless. It’s like reading a book on how to swim or ride a bike, if someone throws you in the water or gives you some pedals all that reading doesn’t mean ■■■■. Getting in the water, or on the pedals, breaking bones, making mistakes, this is how we learn an active discipline.
We’re here to be TESTED. We don’t know the answer immediately, and this is how we LEARN. We’re here to solve puzzles, and we enjoy it. No, we’re not hacking veterans, but we’re on the right path. And maybe, once we get there, we’ll be on call for the next wave of beginners, to hold their hand through the hardest part - getting started.
Appreciate the comments guys, I would just like to say that I dont care if people did the box theirselves, or if people think that I did the box myself, its just that for me looking at hints ruins the box for me(especially the feeling of success afterwards), plus I feel that I learn much less if I read hints(I learn so much going down huge rabbit holes) .
The hint thing is probably just a bug in my personality lol
Type your comment> @eilambiran said:
Appreciate the comments guys, I would just like to say that I dont care if people did the box theirselves, or if people think that I did the box myself, its just that for me looking at hints ruins the box for me(especially the feeling of success afterwards), plus I feel that I learn much less if I read hints(I learn so much going down huge rabbit holes) .
The hint thing is probably just a bug in my personality lol
I share that a little, and I agree that you most often learn more from failure than from success.
However, there comes a point where no matter how hard you try, you just can’t unlock your front door with a hot-dog. Sometimes you just won’t know what you are supposed to do next because you haven’t learned that technique/tool/etc. yet.
At that point, after already exhausting your own knowledge and guesses, perhaps looking up hints gives you the best of both worlds.
Some tips can be friendly to people who are just getting started (like me), and will not make them lose confidence or enthusiasm for it. And it’s better to give them a hint to keep going than to give the answer directly
@svenkali said:
Quote)
However, there comes a point where no matter how hard you try, you just can’t unlock your front door with a hot-dog. Sometimes you just won’t know what you are supposed to do next because you haven’t learned that technique/tool/etc. yet.
I agree.
I dont know how to quote here
ego
hey my two and a half cents on this amazing topic it goes like this: there’s a certain component in hacking that is problem solving - solving problems you don’t know much about and being able to find that information quickly because there’s too much new tech every day you can’t possibly study it all even if you tried it’s like watching all of youtube not gonna work cause people upload a million years of video per second. See it’s the same thing, like making your way swimming through this giant trash pile of tech 
lol
So you know you gotta be able to do that, right?
But there’s another aspect cause there’s tech that’s complex and you need to understand multiple things at the same time to make the hack work and at a certain level it becomes pointless to try yourself because if you would need to know things about each part of the tech stack it’s maybe an easy hack but you can’t learn how apache nginx reverse proxy works only to figure out how to make a reverse shell in that certain configuration like bad example but do you get what I mean??? Then it’s much better to have a tutorial, stepbystep reenact get practice this is much better. But then you cant rank here if you always wait for the box to become retired so people ask their way through the entire box or cheat or whatever. crazy
Personally, I never found any boxes “easy” here - but that is good from my perspective since my main focus here is to learn.
By learning I ask questions, nudges etc to gain an understanding of what to use, how to use etc.
Ranks and points used to bother me (in the beginning) but I am ignoring those now - since if I don’t I will be forever trying to chase the points and ranks rather than gaining the knowledge.
If something takes @snowscan, @jkr or @InfoSecJack 1 hour to complete than it will take me at least a week or more - lol 