Background

I have always had a strong interest in security and more specific Penetration Testing. I originally started my journey back in 2008 by studying for my BSc in Forensics Computing but unfortunately the first year of the degree was very intense around learning about computer laws, this swayed me into moving into web development and completing my degree in this area. My passion for learning how to do penetration test still continued but I was in a position were I had no real background knowledge of penetration testing and the courses that I did look at were either too basic or too advance for me at the current time.

As time went pass the hunger to learn about penetration testing and hacking continued and grow, I decided to start doing some more research into available courses that I could do in my spare time as I worked full time. I heard about CEH but realised it was more about theory and not the practical side so I continued looking and then stumbled across this beautiful site Offensive Security. After looking at what Offensive Security offered I did some digging around and saw that they offered a home study course that promised to take me from a zero to a person that understands what hacking is and more importantly how to get into the mindset of a hacker (and yes they did it).

And so it begins…

So I decided to sign up for the OSCP PWK course early December and chose to start the actual course on Sunday the 18th of December, I chose this day as it would allow me to study over the Christmas period and also it allowed me to take a day to get things set up before the madness started. I decided that for the next 4 months (yes 120 days) that I was going to make the most of the course by starting most morning at 4am, this gave me 3 hours of study before starting work.

I woke at 4am on the Monday the 19th and it hit me that this was going to be a very long 4 months but as I came to realise a very enjoyable 4 months.

The first few weeks of the course consisted of me going through both the video and pdf tutorials, it seamed slow at first as it was all new to me so for every 10 mins of reading I did probably an additional 30 minutes of extra reading to understand the topic I was reading.

As I progressed with the tutorials a fellow student told me to hit the labs and forget the focused training… It was awesome advice thanks 5t0n3r

The first machine I did was an actual walk through supplied by offensive security for which I would highly recommend anybody doing the OSCP PWK course to try. The walkthrough gives a step-by-step guide to conducting a penetration test. As I progressed through the walkthrough everything seemed to be fine until there was some instructions missing, offensive security mention that the missing part is in the PDF/Videos so back to the tutorials, I was on the tutorials for a fair amount of time trying to figure out what I was missing… The thing I was missing did eventually come to mind and at that moment I actually (yes actually) fist punched the air.