Newbie to the max.

[FluffnStuff]

Hello all,
I have just jumped into the world of serious computer curiosity this week and have had some success in learning about hardware, software, programming and now hopefully, some hacking.

I took down mission one in a jiffy but I think it's because I had some intuition from past trials on my computer. In the past I've accidently clicked (insert thing you need to know to click here) and recognized the html language in it. After seeing the prompt, I did what I had to find the password.

I feel like my memory has cheated me on getting the full experience on this one. How did other people figure it out/what was I supposed to know in order to beat mission 1?

[Ramurak]

I had the same feeling with a lot of the Basic Missions. Don't worry too much about it. The first few really are just common sense, and you really should be able to dick your way through them without too much in the way of real knowledge. That's WHY they're basic missions. As you go through the series, you'll run into more and more things that you don't understand, and that's how you know it's time to pause and check a forum thread. Get a few clues about where you're stumped and hop on google to find some resources about what exactly you need to learn to complete that aspect of it. That's how you'll start building your knowledge base and filing away the different things you'll need to know. Don't think of it as a race. I started getting frustrated and checked YouTube for a couple answers...try to avoid that if you can. You WANT to be stumped sometimes...it tells you when you need to go learn about something. Then come back and approach it again. I cheated a couple times when I was pretty sure I had the right idea, but some small detail escaped me...such as the proper syntax of an injection or whatever. I'm still learning quite a lot. But i've noticed that a lot of the things I learn don't actually happen here. You can check the forums, and dig around google or whatever...but the times that I learn something the most thoroughly, are when I can't find the right direction on HERE, and where somebody didn't post a spoiler in the forums...so I have to go out myself and learn the right way to do a thing.

[centip3de]

Hello all,
I have just jumped into the world of serious computer curiosity this week and have had some success in learning about hardware, software, programming and now hopefully, some hacking.

I took down mission one in a jiffy but I think it's because I had some intuition from past trials on my computer. In the past I've accidently clicked (insert thing you need to know to click here) and recognized the html language in it. After seeing the prompt, I did what I had to find the password.

I feel like my memory has cheated me on getting the full experience on this one. How did other people figure it out/what was I supposed to know in order to beat mission 1?

The first mission is often called the 'idiot test' around here, because the knowledge required to pass it is extremely easy. So, don't feel as though you missed the full experience, it just means you were ahead of the game (besides, there wasn't much of an experience anyway).

[tremor77]

A lot of the missions are going to be like that.. since, much of it is concept hack these days, even the most novice of web developers will have much of that protected and the other 95% of the general website population has moved to hosted blogs/cms stuff like wordpress. Once you get up into the SQL injection and XSRF stuff, you'll get the 'experience'.

side note: We def. need more CMS hacking discussion 'round here.