Before You Start

Read this first

This course is built around one practice machine you run on your own computer. Everything you do, you do to that machine, and a scoring engine grades it live.

Do the Linux course first

Intro to Linux is the prerequisite, and you should do it first. This course teaches you no general command usage at all: it assumes you can already move around a terminal, read a file, and edit one.

The exception is timing. If competition is days away and this is last-second preparation, start here anyway and look things up as you go. You will get less out of it, but you will get something, and something now beats everything later.

If you already know how CyberPatriot works

Skip ahead. This unit is setup and scoring mechanics only.

Nothing later depends on this unit except having the machine running.

What you need

Two downloads, both free, both linked in the next lesson:

1. VirtualBox, the program that runs the practice machine.
2. The practice image itself, a single large file you import into VirtualBox.

You also need about 15 GB of free disk space and a computer that can spare 4 GB of memory while the machine is running.

What the points look like

Every image is scored out of 100, but how that 100 is split changes from image to image. For this image it looks like this:

You get one incredibly insecure machine and a clock. Every point comes from getting rid of things that are not supposed to be on there, or from securing the general machine as well as it can be secured.

💡 Your score can go down. That last row is the one people forget. Removing something the machine was supposed to have costs you points you had already earned.