2017-05-25 18:12:00
Here's another question I've had a few times, which came to me again this weekend:
"I'm really surprised you had the confidence to tackle the exam with just 19.
Is this you bread and butter ? Was this simply to formalize existing knowledge for you ?"
To be honest, I was just as surprised that I passed! No, I don't have workexperience in the field of pen-testing; I've only done two or three CTFs.
My original intention with my exam was to consider it a recon missions for my second exam. I was sure that 19 out of 55+ hosts was not enough to be prepared for the exam. I went into the exam fully reconciled with the idea that failing was not just an option, but all but assured. The exam would be a training mission, to learn what to expect.
The day before my exam I had practiced exploiting a known buffer overflow in EasyRMtoMP3Converter (EXE). Here's the CoreLan writeup from 2009. Using the approach I learned during the PWK class and by studying various published exploits, I built my own Python script to exploit the software. After some additional work, the code worked against both Windows 7 and XP.
This extra practice paid off, because I managed to finish the BOF part of the exam within two hours. This was basically the wind in my sails, what got me through the whole exam. After finishing the BOF I dared to hope that I might actually have a chance :) And I did.
kilala.nl tags: work, sysadmin,
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