Hints and Tips for PythonChallenge level 4

This is a page of hints for the Pythonchallenge.com level 4 challenge

It does not contain the answer so you can use as many hints as you want but still have to put everything together yourself to complete it

Note: A lot of these challenges have multiple different ways of solving them, the hints here might not match to what you have found already.

Expand for hint 1

Do not try to manually follow the numbers, there are 100’s

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Does Python have a library for reading the content of webpages?

Expand for hint 3

Try Beautiful soup

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Can you generate a new url based on what Beautiful soup finds?

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Not all the numbers are the same length

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The last page doesn’t have anymore numbers

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Hints and Tips for PythonChallenge level 3

This is a page of hints for the Pythonchallenge.com level 3 challenge

It does not contain the answer so you can use as many hints as you want but still have to put everything together yourself to complete it

Note: A lot of these challenges have multiple different ways of solving them, the hints here might not match to what you have found already.

Expand for hint 1

Anything interesting in the source code?

Expand for hint 2

3 big bodyguards? what could that mean?

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Can you open the text in python like in challenge 2?

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Can Python search for patterns in text?

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Maybe Regex can help?

Expand for hint 6

Exactly 3 bodyguards, not more.

Hints and Tips for PythonChallenge level 2

This is a page of hints for the Pythonchallenge.com level 2 challenge

It does not contain the answer so you can use as many hints as you want but still have to put everything together yourself to complete it

Note: A lot of these challenges have multiple different ways of solving them, the hints here might not match to what you have found already.

Expand for hint 1

Are all the clues visible on the page?

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Maybe there’s something hidden in the source code?

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Are all the characters the same? do some of them repeat? are any unique?

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Can Python open text files and read them?

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Can you automatically remove duplicate characters?

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Have you come across the replace method before?

Hints and Tips for PythonChallenge level 1

This is a page of hints for the Pythonchallenge.com level 1 challenge

It does not contain the answer so you can use as many hints as you want but still have to put everything together yourself to complete it

Note: A lot of these challenges have multiple different ways of solving them, the hints here might not match to what you have found already.

<details><summary>Expand for hint 1</summary>If A=B, and B=C, what does C=?

</details><details><summary>Expand for hint 2</summary>if A=C, and B=D, what does C=?

</details><details><summary>Expand for hint 3</summary>Did Caeser ever invent a cipher?

</details><details><summary>Expand for hint 4</summary>Any interesting words in the page title?

</details><details><summary>Expand for hint 5</summary>What can you do with the maketrans() python method?

</details><details><summary>Expand for hint 6</summary>Once you have translated the text, try editing the URL again

Recovering from Kali Linux network manager error

I’ve been working with a virtual image of Kali recently using VMWare workstation and had a problem where the machine would work fine for a few hours and then the applications would freeze and would not allow you to open new windows or tabs(you could close existing apps)

If I restarted the virtual machine it then failed to boot. The screen would freeze on this image below and start flashing between showing the text and a black screen.

The main clue pointing the problem is the reoccurring error [Failed] Failed to start network manager:

The first time it happened I just reinstalled the image but after the second time I thought it would be smarter to see if there was a quicker way to fix the problem. You can’t do anything from the above screen but it was possible to reinstall the network manager from recovery mode.

To do so, reboot the virtual machine and select the 2nd option from the GRUB window:

After that select recovery mode:

This will eventually ask for the root password and give you a prompt you can use to reinstall the faulty package. This will also update it if possible (which hopefully fixes the bugs causing it to crash in the first place)

sudo apt-get –reinstall install network-manager

 

Jack Dorsey twitter simswap

This article from the BBC today https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-norfolk-49513692 talks about how the CEO of twitter Jack Dorsey was a victim of a sim swap attack recently where someone “tricked” a phone provider into transferring the phone number associated with Jacks account onto a different SIM which they control.

“trick” is in quotes as it could just as easily been done by paying the phone company operator to turn a blind eye and no tricks were needed. The attacker then proceeded to tweet some offensive and embarrassing things.

The interesting thing isn’t that a sim swap happened (they seem to be at almost epidemic levels currently), but that twitter doesn’t have some sort of extra controls for high level accounts which could minimise the damage caused by an account take over.

Perhaps they could look at implementing some sort of account feature which signifies that you have a “corporate” or “professional” account and automatically blocks any tweets containing offensive or rude words, or restricts tweets to only come out during predefined business hours.

if the feature also had a mandatory 24-48 hour delay between turning it off/on it would serve as a simple buffer to prevent a drunken disgruntled employee with access to a corporate account logging in at 2am and posting something offensive

It would also have made it slightly harder for whoever took over Jacks account to cause as much offence.