What is Hack the box ?

Hack the Box is an online penetration testing platform that can be used by cybersecurity professionals, practitioners or pretty much anyone who is intrested in cybersecurity to practice their skills. It contains a set of vulnerable machines that can be used to imporve your hacking skills.

What do I think about Hack the Box ?

“A Hacker, when given a new device, (or software) instead of asking what it does, rather asks, what can I make it do?”. Hack the Box like any other hacking platforms such as vulnhub makes an individual think out of the box, and Hack the box is a great platform for someone who is willing to spend time and effort on learning about, then tweaking and possibly inventing.

I personally think doing boxes on this platform is a great way to sharpen the skills and get an information security career. I work as a cyber security consultant at the moment so my day to day job involves hacking system so when it comes to playing hack the box I tend to get almost no time for it and some of the boxes are very unrealistic but nonetheless I love playing hack the box, don’t get me wrong there have been times which invloved bashing my head on my keyboard and swearing. Additionally, another good thing is that you have to solve a preliminary challenge in order to even sign up. Weeds out the people who don’t know what they’re doing.

I have been very active on hack the box during the month March-2020 amid “CORONA VIRUS” outbreak.

I owned 6 system and 6 user in march.

However, I have been noticing some problems with the connection to htb machines. I didn’t have any problems with the first machine but then I noticed that some machines were consistently getting ‘reset’. On some machine, I spend hours waiting for connection resets and to get output from NMAP and eventually the request times out after a while. I thought it was just one machine but as I was going further I realized that it’s not just one machine. Well, the good thing is I had a lot of time in my hand since everything in north america is on lock down so I kept going. Yesterday as I was explaning this to one of my collegue he asked me, “would you still play hack the box if the city wasn’t in lock down?” Hmm.. that got me thinking, and the answer is HELL YEAH? I won’t sit infront of my computer regenerating openVPN package and changing my network configuration often. Nevertheless,I will still play maybe couple of hours on the evening or on the weekends so if you’re a student or someone who is intrested in cyber security and have time to learn this is a great way to start.

I did’nt mean this blog to sound like my personal dairy or a review for HTB.