I was not sure what to expect when going into the NCL practice game. I had never participated in a cybersecurity challenge before, and I had barely done anything in cybersecurity at all. What surprised me most was how much I enjoyed it. Just like with most things in my life, I get extremely interested in something for a little bit and then hate it. That happened with cybersecurity when I started this class. However, starting the practice game made me like it all over again. There was a certain feeling I experienced while playing the game that made me want to keep going. I found myself relying on the internet for many things. I know that research is a big part of cybersecurity, but I need to increase my knowledge.
Even though I loved it, I certainly got frustrated. The password cracking challenge that required a wordlist of adjective+noun+number format seemed easy at first. However, once I started, I could not get any passwords to be cracked. I used several wordlists, and none of them would work. I put them into Claude.ai at one point. It did crack one password, but it would not get anymore. It took me forever to finish the challenge. I had to go through millions and millions of passwords to finally get them. I also could not get LibreOffice installed on my Kali VM. I wanted to use it for the log analysis section. I used Excel in class once for a log analysis question, and it made it so much easier than piping 15 arguments into a grep command. I eventually just relied on AI to parse the log for me. After that, I had it give me commands to verify the answers. Log analysis is a category I prefer to use AI on. It is such a waste of time for me.
I still enjoyed the challenge heavily. Finishing password cracking and getting so close to 100% in the competition felt amazing. Password cracking felt like it would never end. After struggling for hours on it, I finally finished. However, web exploitation was a different story. The first two challenges were not so bad. It was not until the final challenge that I really struggled. I was completely lost. Outside of this competition, I had never touched anything like this. I was going into it completely blind. I do not think there was even an exercise in the gym that was similar. I was so eager to finish it, so I did not stop until the challenge was over. After it was done, I needed to know what I missed. I went into the NCL Discord and discussed the challenge. Based on the chat, it seemed like the challenge was not enjoyed by most.
The practice game was really what I needed. I felt burnt out of cybersecurity already, but this gave me the boost I needed to get back into it. For my first time, I think I did fairly well. Seeing how some people finished in 2 days was very humbling. That is just a reminder that I have a lot of room to grow. I am becoming increasingly nervous about the individual game. There are more challenges and even less time. If I can focus and spend all the time I need on it, I think I can make myself proud.