Advent of Cyber: Time for some Holiday fun with TryHackMe!

Greg Heffner November 23, 2024

Hey everyone! Its that time of year again! Some of my favorite things to do when learning new IT skills is use my hands. TryHackMe has a series called Advent of Cyber where they have a Christmas theme and a story where there is a technical issue or misconfiguration and we have to take steps each day with puzzles to find out what happened and stop it before its too late.

Here is a video about it:

This years theme: "How the Glitch stole SOC-mas"

What to do:

If you want to join me and my friends who do this all you have to do is sign up! TryHackMe as you know from my previous blogs is free. Once you have an account you can load the "Advent of Cyber 2024" page and on Dec 1st start the challenge!

How to win:

This year, TryHackMe is hosting its largest prize draw yet, with prizes totaling over $100,000! The event works like this:

1. Answering Questions: Each time you answer a question correctly, you earn a raffle ticket.
2. Raffle Tickets: The more raffle tickets you collect, the higher your chances of winning prizes. Grand Prize: The top prize includes DEF CON tickets along with accommodation.
3. Completion Requirement: To be eligible for the grand prize, you need to complete all tasks in this specific room by December 31st.
4. Certificate of Completion: Successfully completing all tasks will also earn you a certificate of completion.

This event encourages participants to answer as many questions as possible to increase their chances of winning and to complete all tasks for a shot at the grand prize and a certificate.

Prep before the start:

So you already have an account and you know what we can win. So how to be successful....

The great thing about these events is that THM makes them so that each year they can be completed by the most novice to the most advance person and still have a blast! You do need to have a good understanding of how to use THM because most of you are going to have to use their virtual machines in their web based environment called "AttackBox." You should know how to start and connect to the machine in order to do these daily challenges. If you do not know how or would like a walkthrough to dust off some of these old skills, check out task 4 in this years Advent of Cyber 2024 challenge and they will walk you through it.

Check out these two blogs specifically aboutTryHackMe.com if you would like to know how I prepare.
TryHackMe: Command Line Confessions or Class Setup: My learning tech stack - Learn for Free

Help:

This year I am doing something new. I have made a discord channel specifically for this AoC challenge. Advent of Cyber Discord I invite you all to join it and post questions you may have, updates, or even your big wins! I will be doing the same.

Good luck and have fun!