When handling customer support for PentesterLab, we often get emails from people who can’t solve a challenge:
“… I have been working on this challenge for the past 3 days and I really can’t get it to work.”
Often, it’s a tiny detail that is missing. Some encoding, a small typo, or something similar. After solving the issue, we sometimes get an email like:
“… I can’t believe I missed that, I’m such an idiot…”
And this is our usual reply:
It’s normal to make mistakes. You’re here to learn. Don’t be too hard on yourself. This is hard, and every detail matters.
If you spend 3 days struggling to solve a lab, and after 3 days you decide to contact support, you should be proud of yourself. You tried really hard, you struggled, and you didn’t give up for a long time despite how frustrating it can be.
Now you have the answer, you know what mistakes you made. Trust me, you’re not going to forget this one. And it’s likely to be the first thing you will check next time you get stuck.
You are much better than you were 3 days ago. You spent a fair amount of time trying to debug what was happening. Learning to debug payloads and exploits is probably more important than managing to exploit an issue on the first try. I would argue that most hacking is about trying to understand or guess with a high level of certainty what the issue actually is (or if there is an issue at all).
Keep going, embrace the suck, you are on the right path!
