Studying for PJPT

I've recently started studying for TCM Security's Practical Junior Penetration Tester certification. As part of buying the certification, TCM offers training in the form of a practical penetration testing course. I actually took the precursor course to this one when it was available on Udemy a few years back. It's been cool to see the updated content and get a refresher on things that I haven't done it a while.

Currently I'm halfway through the course and there's a mid course capstone involving exploiting vulnerable machines you can host via virtualbox. I've been happy with my ability so far to exploit these machines with very little use of any writeups or the provided walkthroughs for the course. I managed to get initial access on every machine and rooted them all except one without any help. The one machine I needed help with was the one Windows machine, named Butler, and that was just the privilege escalation part. I'm going to be throwing my own notes on the boxes on this site for anyone curious to view the way I managed to root the boxes. I actually did things a little differently than the provided walkthroughs ended up doing which I thought was pretty cool.