Comment by erganemic

I've had a background interest in getting involved in CTFs for a while now, but haven't yet made it a point to overcome the activation energy to do anything beyond Overthewire's Bandit. I'd be interested in hearing how other people coming from a pure software engineering background (+ associated Linux knowledge) got started. I run into a dependency graph where I'd like to join a team and learn from others, but I need some baseline skill to do that, which requires either a top-down approach of what feels like memorizing tricks that may-or-may-not apply to a given box, or a bottom-up approach of spending a ton of time learning about the fundamentals of networking and file systems (which is often nontrivial to convert into techniques that can be used in CTFs). I know for stuff like this the key is to just get started, and the understanding will follow, but I'm curious if anyone has any recommendations for how to do that.