My next room on the learning pathway was the Upload Vulnerabilities room, but as I am starting to find, I had to break off to complete two other recommended rooms before this one. So I started with the Web Enumeration room which focuses on a tool called Gobuster, which searches through a targeted website to find all the directories, subdomains and other files that are located on a web server at a URL.

I had to install Gobuster onto my Kali machine using apt-get install but it didn’t take long and it was ready to go. Using the tool is again pretty easy – you use a word list from Kali and then Gobuster will cycle through the web app trying all the terms from that list to see if they are present. This takes a few minutes as the list to try was approximately 220,000 words long.

A lot of time on these tasks is taken up waiting for lists to be checked. It can be a little tedious, and you just have to wait.

The other thing I had trouble with here was the use of the term “directory scan” – in one instance it meant actually using GB to perform a directory scan, and in the other, it meant navigating to the actual website to scan the directories for what I was looking for. That was a little frustrating.

I also misunderstood the etc/hosts echo part, and accidentally edited the file manually, so that meant that the scans didn’t work for the virtual hosts. This led me down a rabbit hole of info on the web, before finally getting back to it. Eventually I found all the flags and files I needed. So it was time to move on to the second part of the room, WPScan.

I am definitely learning a lot – but how to put everything together at the moment is still a mystery. But being familiar with the terms and software, and also watching some Youtube videos has really helped.