[boneitis]

It's probably also worth noting how old a lot of these games are. Bandit, for example, looks like it was released in '12. Back then, I imagine there weren't straight-up solutions plastered in every direction you looked.

As an industry junior now, I get asked all the time on how to get started. Out of desire to not give a gatekeeping response, I can only shrug and point people to OTW-Bandit/picoCTF and tell them to try to do what they can on their own but Google every answer if they have to. Everybody's got to start somewhere [e: snip].

I'll freely offer kudos to anyone with zero knowledge who even manages to go through a handful of exercises while looking up every answer if they otherwise would have not done anything hands-on at all.

I should probably tweak my response a bit by adding a standing offer of approachability if they actually give it a shot and get stuck on those particular CTFs I suggest them.

Oh, and yes, I have encountered many a CTF problems with very poor problem descriptions. I often don't feel bad about searching around deeply in those cases, if it's not a live competition.

[howLongHowLong]

Its not too difficult to just ignore all search results that reference "bandit" or "overthewire", and thus have an identical experience to before. I suspect there were places on the internet in 2012 where people discussed and disseminated bash tips and tricks.

[yakshaving_jgt]

In 2012? There were places like that in 2002. The technical landscape hasn’t changed wildly in the past decade.