Introducing Topic Exercises

Topic Exercises in PEN-200 (PWK)

Since day one, Offensive Security’s educational model has been to marry quality textual and video-based content with hands-on exercises and labs. The hands-on component of our courses allows students to not only absorb knowledge, but to apply it in novel scenarios.

PEN-200 (PWK) is the pioneer of this approach, by featuring course exercises, as well as a large and rich lab environment. The student journey is simple to describe but by no means trivial. Students are encouraged to:

• Read the text-based content for a given course module
• Watch the corresponding videos to get a better technical understanding of the material
• Perform the course exercises at the end of the module to practice their learnings
• Once all modules are completed, take off their training wheels by diving into the PWK labs

The course exercises are designed to bridge the gap between passive learning and complete penetration testing practice by providing narrowly scoped objectives. However, while the PWK exercises have always been hands-on, they’ve historically lacked three qualities that can improve the student’s learning feedback loop:

• Verifiability – Students should be able to check the solutions of their exercises to make sure that they have answered them correctly
• Trackability – Students should be able to track their progress over time without relying on client-side documentation or note-taking programs
• Interactivity – Students should be able to interact with the machines hosting the exercises directly through the course content

Being one of the first training companies in the infosec industry to move to a practical, online course approach, we continuously look for opportunities to improve the student learning experience. Specifically, we focused on prototyping a new feature that would allow students to test their knowledge of a Topic and track their progress.

Today, we are thrilled to launch Topic Exercises within PWK. This is a new component to the PEN-200 experience that we think you are going to love. We have been prototyping this for over a year now. Since it’s such a major change, we wanted to ensure we got it right. Student feedback has been amazingly positive, with many students telling us these exercises are often their favorite component of PWK. We knew we had to bring this feature to all PEN-200 students, and today we are able to make that happen. Topic Exercises within PEN-200 (PWK) give students a more trackable, interactive learning experience. Read on to learn more about this new feature.

Topic Exercises have three components: a question, a machine (or a group of machines), and a flag. The question asks the student to perform a specific action or set of actions on the provided machine. When the student successfully completes the objective, they will receive a flag in the form “OS{random-hash}”. The student can then submit the flag into the Offsec Training Library (OTL), which will tell the student if they have inputted the correct flag or not. The OTL will then save the student’s progress, and track the number of correct submissions provided to date by the student. Here are some more details on these three components:

Questions: Exercises usually (though not always) provide the student with the exact objectives they must accomplish on the machine. The question provides a machine name that the student can start directly inside the OTL. They can then connect to the machine through their Kali Linux VM and the course VPN pack.

Machines: All of the Topic Exercise VMs are contained in the student’s own individual lab environment. That is, they do not share these machines with other students, and therefore will be able to start, stop and revert the machines as necessary. The Topic Exercise machines neither replace the PWK shared lab environment, nor do they replace the three dedicated client machines assigned to each student.

Flags: Flags are often found as the contents of text files, but they can be hidden in a variety of locations. Flags always have a definite length, but are randomized on each revert of the exercise machine. Flags are always of the form “OS{hashgoeshere}”.

(Please note, PEN-100 is specifically designed to prepare students for PEN-200, so students who are studying both PEN-100 and PEN-200 may notice some similarities and overlap in the exercises).

Topic Exercises have been pilot tested by several groups of PWK students, and have been extremely well received. We’re excited to release Topic Exercises to the entire PWK student body!

If a picture is worth 1000 words, then a video is worth 1000 pictures! Take a look at the demo below to get a better understanding of how Topic Exercises work.

Upcoming Schedule

Today’s release provides Topic Exercises to all current PWK students for the following modules:

• Getting Comfortable with Kali Linux
• Command Line Fun
• Practical Tools
• Bash Scripting
• Passive Information Gathering
• Web Application Attacks
• Locating Public Exploits
• Fixing Exploits
• Privilege Escalation
• Vulnerability Scanning

We plan on releasing the second set of Topic Exercises some time in the middle of March 2022. This will complete the launch of Topic Exercises.

Students will note that as of today, PWK content contains both Topic Exercises and the traditional exercise text. This is because the Offensive Security Certified Professional (OSCP) exam associated with PEN-200 has a bonus point component. The requirements for bonus points with regard to exercises are not changing at this time. Only the traditional exercises must be reported on in the accompanying lab report to be considered for bonus points.

We’re looking forward to hearing your feedback on Topic Exercises and we’re excited about providing novel ways for you to apply your knowledge, skills, and abilities towards preparing for your OSCP certification. We will be hosting Discord Office hours on Friday, February 4th at 1 p.m EST, where we will have an informal AMA to provide students with the opportunity to ask questions directly to our Content and Student Experience teams.

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