I am a huge fan of CTF’s and play them at every available opportunity to sharpen my skills and keep them up to date.
One of the biggest challenges for playing a CTF is to ensure that the VM’s to be used during the event are always up to date and have all of the tools ready. I usually do this before a day, so it is a full day of running apt-get update and check for updates for a whole day before.
Pen tester academy solves this beautifully with ctf.live by serving up the whole Linux or windows desktop with all of the tools served up within the browser. No more maintaining VM’s and no more VPN configuration shenanigans. The best part is that I can run it from any device. Here’s how a challenge looks within a browser window (running on the ipad)
This runs flawlessly and I’ve been able to start working on challenges as and when I find the time. hopefully, I’ll get the time to work on more challenges going forward.