I took part in an "ethical hacking" workshop yesterday. There was a number of "capture the flag" exercises. It was not more interesting than than reading comments and pathnames in PHP scripts and running Curl. We didn't even get to do code injection or anything more creative than accessing random files through insecure PHP scripts. Hacking is overrated.

Or ethics is overrated

Or hacking workshops are overrated.

@Kusalananda Is that "hacking", as in, try to break into stuff?

Because that's the Hollywood meaning of "hacking".

@FaheemMitha No, it was a "capture the flag" thing, i.e. try to find a specific hidden string somewhere, given a web site. We never got or needed shell access to the remote system.

@Kusalananda Oh. Why try to find a specific hidden string?

The most interesting one was one where the actual flag-string was scrambled in plain text in a hidden file outside of /var/www. It was "rot9"-scrambled, so running it through /usr/games/caesar unscrambled it.

All the other ones were basically a matter of reading comments in PHP scripts saying "don't look in the 'calendar' directory, there's nothing there", then looking there to find the flag.

A mildly interesting one was to present a login page with a made-up cookie to "steal a session".

@FaheemMitha yes, thanks. Haven't had time to look into it though.

Oopsi, the whole of my University appears to have fallen off the Internet.

Ah, broken fiber.

@Kusalananda Did they fix your fiber?

@jesse_b Yep, that was fixed about an hour ago. It was apparently quite a big fault and a lot of cable had to be replaced.

Did they say what caused it? One of my ISPs always has the best reasons

I wasn't affected at all apart from not being able to fetch my work mail and access some of the servers I use for work.

One time the fiber was cut by a homeless person building shelter along the railroad tracks

wow they are fast

Usually when we have a fiber cut it takes them at least 6 hours to repair it

Probably a digger digging in the wrong spot.

There's a lot of building work in that region.

yeah that is most common for us

one time the wire was above ground on a telephone pole and a construction site dropped something on them from a crane lol

eunetworks has an undersea cable that has been broken two, if not three times since I have been working here and it takes them over a week to repair it each time

:-) This is a dedicated SUNET (Swedish University Network) fibre cable. Having a fault on it is a big deal.

I believe it affected three 10 GBit/s links.

Anyway, back to writing interview questions...

@Kusalananda "We finish the interview and you step outside the office and find a lottery ticket that ends up winning $10 million. What would you do?"

"How many pennies would fit into this room?"

:-)

@Kusalananda: I don't get your 4 backslash argument

\\\\ gets nicely interpreted as \\

$ printf "\\\n"
\n$
$ printf "\\\\n"
\n$
$

\\\ is also \\

\\\ gets interpreted as \ and then the interpretation of the last \ depends on the next character

@jesse_b Is it? Try printf "\\\"

:)

well printf "\\\\" only prints a single \

It does, which is what we want.

Well, we wanted \n so I used printf "\\\\n"

@Kusalananda @jesse_b *\\\\ gets nicely interpreted as \* by printf if inside single quotes. Yes, by the shell if inside double quotes, but, in that case printf outputs a single \. Try printf '\\\\' and printf "\\\\"