Cicada is an excellent beginner-friendly Windows box designed for those new to Windows pentesting, without requiring any knowledge of Active Directory or its attack vectors and strategies. It focuses on the early stages of enumeration, which are essential for tackling more advanced machines, as well as some basic manual checks you can perform once you obtain a user shell.

This is an insane Windows machine with one of the largest attack surfaces I’ve ever encountered on a single target. One could even argue that it deserves to be published as an Endgame or perhaps even a mini Pro Lab.

"Trickster" is a medium-difficulty Linux machine on HackTheBox that challenges you with technologies like Git, MySQL, Docker, and vulnerabilities such as SSTI and CSRF. This write-up covers the key steps and techniques I used to exploit the machine, highlighting the creative enumeration and exploitation required to capture the flags.