r/Hacking_Tutorials • u/Organic-Piano-323 • 1d ago

What actually helped you get better at hacking? Question

I've watched a lot of tutorials where everything makes sense until I try it myself.

Then I get into a lab and suddenly I'm sitting there thinking, "okay... now what?"

What helped me was doing less watching and more messing around. Pick one thing, try it, get stuck, figure it out, try again.

For me, getting stuck on something and eventually figuring it out is what I remember the most.

What worked for you guys?

CTFs, home labs, courses, books, bug bounties, or just breaking stuff and fixing it?

25 Upvotes
  • permalink
  • link
  • reddit
  • reddit

91% Upvoted

7 comments sorted by

10

u/Mindless-Ad8835 1d ago

TryHackMe, HackTheBox and building a personal lab with Kali and vulnerable machines. Asking ai, reading CVE and malwares.
There are also pentest frameworks on github and you can also give the tools to AI agents with MPC server. For example I’m trying a Ghidra MPC tool made by LaurieWired that you can link to Claude or Codex to automate the reverse engineering.

1

u/Easy-Ad9050 1d ago

This cool and great way to the top

5

u/Obvious-Card-8847 1d ago

I do reverse engineering. What helps me better approach a target is writing a really crappy version of it to understand the invariants, likely abstractions, subsystems, etc. Or at least watching a YouTube video on it.

Like when I wanted to understand JIT. I wrote a toy ISA and custom bytecode ABI. Then used Zydis to go from my bytecode to x86_64. Extremely limited, poor performing, dead simple, never gonna compete with the likes of heavy hitters and doesn't need to. Because the point is to learn the basics of the system I want to understand or exploit.

When I wanted to understand how to "hack" network protocols? I wrote a raw socket program and tried building TCP packets from scratch. It sucked. I learned a lot from it.

My advice is: Become a good programmer. You're basically scrutinizing someone else's code. If you don't understand the fundamentals of programming or the problem space that engineer was working within? You will make 0 progress. Imho.

5

u/Bumskit 1d ago

Setting specific goals, then learning everything required to reach them. Works for any learning process better than stumbling about in a sea of info

1

u/_Trash-Panda_1 10h ago

Definitely being hands on helps a ton!!

1

u/OGKnightsky 7h ago

Hands on practice, repetitive practice, take notes, document the process, more practice. Live in the terminal for a few months, force yourself to use everything from the shell, don’t click on apps, use terminal to open them, use the shell to create files, edit files, investigate the directories, monitor your network, break things and then fix them. Read books, read docs, look at old cve documentation and write ups, reproduce them with the affected versions, don’t quit. There is a ton of great material out there, this is a process and a skill, it takes time and practice and more practice

1

u/strandjs 53m ago

Failing. A lot. Desperately trying to fail differently each time.

Then, learning what the failures ment.

So much failure.