SmashTheStack
SmashTheStack
SmashTheStack is a non-profit organization providing a platform for learning penetration testing and ethical hacking. Since its inception, it has focused on delivering hands-on experience through SSH-based challenges.
Platform Overview
The platform offers seven core challenges, with each challenge consisting of approximately 10 progressive levels, totaling around 70 individual challenges. Unlike other platforms, SmashTheStack employs a direct SSH connection approach to access challenge machines, requiring no registration for participation.
Challenge Structure
Challenges on SmashTheStack are organized in levels that build upon each other. While the platform covers various cybersecurity topics, these aren't explicitly categorized. Users prove their success by editing a text file upon completing a challenge or level.
Access and Usage
To start a challenge, users establish an SSH connection to the machine hosting the challenge. This direct connection approach differs from web-based platforms, offering a more traditional, command-line oriented learning experience.
Alternatives
✔️ Root-Me offers the largest variety of content dedicated to cybersecurity with over 580 challenges. These are well-categorized into specific topics like Network, Steganography, Programming, and Web-Server challenges. Each challenge includes difficulty ratings, explanations, and helpful resources. The platform requires registration and offers different account types based on user contribution levels.
✔️ The platform presents itself as a massive hacking playground with an enormous cyber security community of over 835k users. Its gamified unique learning and hacking approach can make it easy to quickly acquire an skillset for penetration testing. Everyone is welcome to the website, ranging from individual hacker, businesses to universities, which want to elevate their blue and red team cyber security skills.
✔️ If a beginner joins the TryHackMe community, he/she will be able to find write-ups and walkthroughs to challenges on the Internet, when help is needed, as TryHackMe is popular in the penetration testing learning platform field. On the platform there are so called Rooms, which a member can join and solve different tasks regarding a topic. They vary in difficulty and category and are part of learning paths, which are predefined to make the learning uncomplicated. Each room includes directly deployable virtual machines (VM), called AttackBox, that are hosted in the cloud of the platform. By trying to deliver a fun and gamified cyber security learning experience, the platform excels at its best.