5-1: Preparing Walktroughs
To reiterate from the beginning of this piece, the goal of creating a walkthrough is not to create a true pentest report. The objective of writing a walkthrough is, in my case, to write with an orientation towards the reader being a learner first. My second priority is for the walkthrough to represent my own progression, writing it in such a way that it isn't a 100% linear "here's how I did this successfully" but instead to cover the process of rooting the machine, which includes wrong paths and other errors.
There will of course be some editing down of said process, for the sake of length and overall readability.
Drafting
The first draft of a walkthrough is created live as the box is worked on. The specifics of that are already covered in the notetaking section. This will have far more information, both screenshots, pasted code, and notes than will be used in the final version of the walkthrough.
Organization
The structure of the walkthrough itself will mirror the rough order of the major categories covered here:
- Initial Enumeration
- Research/testing for foothold
- Exploitation to gain foothold
- Foothold enumeration
- Foothold research/testing
- Privilege escalation exploit
- Takeaways / Conclusion
The research/testing phases in both the initial and post-foothold sections are where most of the "lessons learned" can be included. The others are more straightforward (with screenshot evidence) "here is the information obtained," or "this exploit was run and this was the outcome."
Additional context can be given with external resources or explanations of technologies as needed for any given segment.
Takeaways is intended as a brief summary of specific areas where either new tools were learned, gotchas that I hadn't encountered yet are called out explicitly, or other learning focused specifics are covered.
A summary section before enumeration isn't in the current format, but I am considering incorporating it as a rough approximation of pentest report language for practice.
Editing
I'm not going to cover how I edit the written aspects, other than to note that there's a lot of cutting down of extraneous detail and simplifying descriptions.
For screenshots, this is where the majority of the work is. First, I don't do anything to the screenshots until I am close to a final draft of the written part. With the writing settled, what screenshots to include—and what within their contents to emphasize—will be clear.
At this stage I switch to using my photo editing software to bring all the screenshots I'm keeping and make the necessary adjustments (cropping, adding text, highlight boxes, blur, etc.). These files are all renamed for easier tracking and added back into the walkthrough text , where I also add alt text descriptions.
Publishing
After this the rest is website publishing specifics that I won't go into for now, mostly tied into adding the necessary metadata to the markdown file that integrates with my custom site.
Once that's done I push the changes to my cloud repo, which is picked up by the build which publishes the new walkthrough on the site.