Hack This Site: Basic Web Challenges – Level 1

Hack This Site Basic Web 1


This post is about web hacking and walks through the basic challenge level 1 on Hack This Site. This challenge is fairly easy even for the less computer literate. The purpose of this challenge is to get the user to view the source code of the application in order to retrieve the poorly hidden password.

Hack This Site Basic Web Challenge 1
Hack This Site Basic Web Challenge 1

After creating an account and logging in, head over to the basic challenges and go to basic challenge one. You should be greeted with a screen like the one below. The first thing you need to do is right-click the page and select view page source.

Hack This Site Basic Web Page Source
Basic 1 – view page source

Once you have the page source window open, you should see a lot of code. The first thing to do is to find the search function and search for interesting words such as password.

Hack This Site Basic Web Search
Searching for password

As you can see from the snippet of code below, you should be able to retrieve the password and submit it to the application.

<td valign="top" class="sitebuffer">
	<center>
		<b>Level 1(the idiot test)</b>
	</center>
This level is what we call "The Idiot Test", if you can't complete it, don't give up on learning all you can, but, don't go begging to someone else for the answer, thats one way to get you hated/made fun of. Enter the password and you can continue. 

<!-- the first few levels are extremely easy: password is 0c620cce -->

Congratulations, you have completed Basic challenge 1. I know this one was very easy but I love Hack This Site and didn’t feel that my blog would be complete without it.

Congratulations
Hack This Site Basic Web Challenges – Level 1

Check out some of my other web articles like Bypassing Web Application Paywalls with User-Agent Switching.