[Bastille]

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1. PRESENTATION

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For many, starting a new year means setting resolutions to achieve their goals. Beyond fitness and health, I want to invite those who are interested—and who sometimes lack a bit of motivation—to join this thread with the following objectives:

- ↪️ Share your daily progress in the field (GitHub contributions, rooms on TryHackMe, etc.).
- 💡 Exchange ideas and get inspired by others to explore new things and see how others study/practice.
- 🗣️ Discuss common or interesting topics.
- 🧠 Share your knowledge with others.
- 🎉 Celebrate your achievements (it’s important to feel proud and boost your ego).



2. THE LEARNING PYRAMID

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For those who don't know, we retain information differently depending on how we learn. Here's the pyramid:

- 😒 Passive Reading : 10%
- 😐 Audio / Visual : 20%
- 😶 Demonstration : 30%
- 😏 Group Discussion : 50%
- 😎 Practice by doing : 75%
- 🤩 Teach Others : 90%✅


It's important to practice, but you can even go further by teaching to others in this thread what you did, improve your learning retention rate !


3. SOURCES TO PRACTICE

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In my thread : https://hackforums.net/showthread.php?tid=6263412 I shared many platforms where you can learn for free, I'm joining the list below to give you some ideas :


[If you begin, and you don't want to spend money, I highly recommend you to start with TryHackMe, then you can decide to spend more.]
o OverTheWire (interesting if you begin, especially to get comfortable with Linux)
o TryHackMe (the one I recommend if you begin)
o HackTheBox (more advanced than TryHackMe, you can go on it after being familiar with cybersecurity)
o Root-Me (general)
o Cryptohack [/url (for learning modern cryptography)
o VulnHub [/url (downloadable vulnerable virtual machines)
o TCM Security (from CyberMentorChief mentioned earlier from YouTube's learning section)
o Let's Defend (more oriented blue team)
o Cyber Defenders (more oriented blue team)

4. HALL OF FAME / LEADERBOARD

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I want to implement a leaderboard on this post based on the activity of the participants, let me know what do you think about it. Feel free to share any of useful metrics such as :


Profile



Yearly activity



In your daily post you're free to share :
- Links to rooms you've completed
- Badges you earned
- Streaks
- Contributions
- and any other thing that could be relevant !

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I wish you all a good luck, a productive year, do the necessary to achieve your goals and become who you want to be.

[Hackers]

100% agreed with this:
practice by doing & teach others

This is the best way for me to learn

[Bastille]

100% agreed with this:
practice by doing & teach others

This is the best way for me to learn

Hope to see you participating to this thread in 2025 ! Let's bring back hackforums to what is used to be, a hacking forum 😎

[ttbr0]

are you going to finally commit to learning programming?

[Hackers]

Hope to see you participating to this thread in 2025 ! Let's bring back hackforums to what is used to be, a hacking forum 😎

News & Happenings & Hacks
;)

Yes, this will be good!
I will see what I can do here

[Bastille]

are you going to finally commit to learning programming?

Yes sir 🫡

Step 1 : I need to consolidate my knowledge and experience regarding SOC analyst daily tasks because I want to work as a SOC analyst tier 2, as tier 1 doesn't sound really interesting ... and I think preparing myself to work as a SOC analyst is my priority (that's why I'm also studying on Letsdefend which as a lot of SOC learning content).

After that, I’ll go back to the basics with Python. I’m already familiar with the language, including lists, dictionaries, and so on. My goal is to work on Python-based malware—both creating my own and analyzing existing ones—since my main interest in programming is for malware analysis and reverse engineering purposes.

If I feel comfortable enough, I’ll then dive into C/C++. However, since it operates at a lower level and interacts more directly with the system, I think I’ll need to spend some time learning the internals of Windows first (right ?)

There’s just so much to learn haha

[theapostlex]

Hello everyone, Glad to be here.

[Bastille]

Just completed :

- 1 SOC case on letsdefend.io : really easy, didn't encounter difficulties. I really love to solve those SOC cases, some of them are from real case scenarios. With the free version of Letsdefend I can only do 15 cases per months. I'm thinking about upgrading to the premium version but Letsdefend is a little bit more expensive compared to tryhack me (anually : 17€ per month for letsdefend, and around 11€ per month for tryhackme) and for the time being I cannot subscribe to paid version for both of them lol


- 1 room on tryhackme.com : EEEEEZ, OSINT / email analysis
https://tryhackme.com/r/room/threatinteltools

[Moooookie]

I'm not much a hacker myself, but I like the idea. Can always use something new for the community, that will help build engagement and spark conversation. Great idea.

[RangoWorld]

Nice one.

I shall look to learn more.

[ttbr0]

Yes sir 🫡

Step 1 : I need to consolidate my knowledge and experience regarding SOC analyst daily tasks because I want to work as a SOC analyst tier 2, as tier 1 doesn't sound really interesting ... and I think preparing myself to work as a SOC analyst is my priority (that's why I'm also studying on Letsdefend which as a lot of SOC learning content).

After that, I’ll go back to the basics with Python. I’m already familiar with the language, including lists, dictionaries, and so on. My goal is to work on Python-based malware—both creating my own and analyzing existing ones—since my main interest in programming is for malware analysis and reverse engineering purposes.

If I feel comfortable enough, I’ll then dive into C/C++. However, since it operates at a lower level and interacts more directly with the system, I think I’ll need to spend some time learning the internals of Windows first (right ?)

There’s just so much to learn haha

interested in starting a github and maybe some community projects?

[TENET]

"Recently, I've been studying the Kali Backdoor Factory..."(^^)

[Bastille]

I'm not much a hacker myself, but I like the idea. Can always use something new for the community, that will help build engagement and spark conversation. Great idea.

I would be glad to see you active here and share your progress :)

Nice one.

I shall look to learn more.

Yeahhh, that's the vibe man, feel free to share any thing you accomplished !

interested in starting a github and maybe some community projects?

I'm not against it but I'm not sure if my programs would be worth it. I still consider myself as a beginner regarding programming for the moment

"Recently, I've been studying the Kali Backdoor Factory..."(^^)

I didn't know this tool and it sounds interesting, did it work for you ? I see that you can inject different types of payloads, which one did you use ?

I see that the payload is injected into a legit program, did you try to run it on VirusTotal or hybrid analysis to see if they detect the payload ?

I'll definitely take a look at this tool, I'm not sure if it's really effective as I guess it can be easily detected, but that's still something interesting to be aware of.

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Just completed my daily hacking training, I had an exhaustive day (just went back from hours at a tattoo shop)

As usual I went with Letsdefend.io and tryhackme.com. For the first one I solved a SOC case using utilman.exe as a LOLbas. However, surprisingly, I didn't find "utilman.exe" on the following site : https://lolbas-project.github.io/#

utilman.exe is a legit Windows system executable file, known as the "Utility Manager" or "Ease of Access Manager." It is used to provide accessibility tools on the login screen, such as Narrator, Magnifier, On-Screen Keyboard, or contrast settings. However it's possible to cirvumvent the primary objective of the tool to get a cmd.exe running as administrator.



Then with Tryhackme I went with an easy room : https://tryhackme.com/r/room/pentestingfundamentals as I'm tired and don't want to spend too much time on it today.

I already knew most of the things however there are few things I've learned. By the way I answered few questions online based on the CompTIA Security+ cert and one of them was about a document during a pentesting, called "Rules of Engagement" (ROE). I answered the question on the test, and completly forgot as I had the same question on tryhackme and wasn't able to answer without reading the text. This room was a good reminder.

I've also learned something new that would have been useful when I was conducting security tests on infrastructures, it's called OSSTMM (Open Source Security Testing Methodology Manual). I didn't spend time on the manual yet (https://github.com/mtesauro/owasp-wte/bl...STMM.3.pdf) but I think I should check it soon

[ttbr0]

I'm not against it but I'm not sure if my programs would be worth it. I still consider myself as a beginner regarding programming for the moment

you should make something useful or start a project that will teach you things. you already have all this theory and knowledge behind detection and analysis so write a program that helps you automate some of it or use it to push yourself to learn more. you can even try replicate functionality from other existing programs without looking at its source (think about how it would work in your head and code it). everyone starts as a beginner and theres no better way to learn something than to just dive in. i can shadow and help you out if you want.

[Bastille]

you should make something useful or start a project that will teach you things. you already have all this theory and knowledge behind detection and analysis so write a program that helps you automate some of it or use it to push yourself to learn more. you can even try replicate functionality from other existing programs without looking at its source (think about how it would work in your head and code it). everyone starts as a beginner and theres no better way to learn something than to just dive in. i can shadow and help you out if you want.

That's really kind thanks for the proposal ttbr0 ! I've seen your post before going to bed and during the night I thought about a program. When I'm performing malware analysis, sometimes the malware also has other files such as .dll with it in the same folder so I need to upload them manually on VT too, one by one, and sometimes it takes time when there are like 20 files.

So I thought about the following tool :
- You put your VT API key in the program
- you select the files you want to analyze, it will firstly perform a md5 hash and upload the hash
- for each hash already known you'll see the result (how many AV detected it as malicious), green if 0/70, red if some AV flagged it
- for unknown hashes, the tool will propose you to upload the files

Maybe it already exists but that could be something interesting to make to learn new things.

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EDIT : not even surprised that it already exists https://github.com/VirusTotal/vt-cli 😂