In the last two days, I described on this page my efforts at cracking the Facebook Hacker Cup 2013 challenge – three separate puzzles. Today we will examine the final one: Find the Min. The actual problem is described below: After sending smileys, John decided to play with arrays. Did you ...

Here's my follow-on to the Facebook Hacker Cup. Yesterday, I told you about my take on the Balanced Smileys puzzle. Today, we'll discuss the easiest challenge, Beautiful Strings. The actual problem is described below: no internet, no Facebook, and no programs. So he did the only thing he ...

I must admit that I was a little bit hesitant whether or not I should enter the Facebook Hacker Cup, but I did it anyway just for the fun of it. There were three problems that needed to be solved and they were named "Beautiful Strings," "Balanced Smileys" and "Find ...

Defining the problem First, we must define the problem before we try to find the solution. The problem with Windows systems is that they can easily be exploited. There are various exploits out there that can exploit the Windows system. This is possible because most of the users don't ...

Initramfs Introduction Before we can continue with configuring the kernel when installing a new gentoo system, we need to create an initramfs. Since the root partition is encrypted, it has to be decrypted during the boot process, which is not done by the linux kernel, so it has to be ...

The /swap Partition We need to encrypt the swap partition, since we don't want encryption keys to be swapped to an unencrypted disk. To do that we can first use the cryptsetup to encrypt the partition and then create a swap filesystem on it in the usual way and ...

Introduction When writing this tutorial, I've referenced the [2] Gentoo Linux guide and added some of my own observations and scripts. This guide should provide you with steps of how you can create an encrypted system partition on Linux, but it will also provide you with general observations about ...

Introduction When performing a penetration test, we're constantly stumbling upon various servers that support domain logins into the customers network. We're allowed to login if we know the username and password of an arbitrary account as well as the domain name. In this article we'll take a ...

When scraping the Google search engine, we need to be careful so that Google doesn't detect our automated tool as a bot, which will redirect us to a captcha website, where we'll need to enter the captcha in order to continue. We don't want that, since then ...

1. Introduction We all know that when programming with a small or large team, having a revision control in place is mandatory. We can choose from a number of revision control systems. The following ones are in widespread use worldwide: CVS Was one of the first revision control systems, and ...