How I Solved “Madness”: An Easy TryHackMe CTF Walkthrough
Are you curious how to tackle beginner-friendly Capture The Flag (CTF) machines on TryHackMe? In this writeup, I’ll walk through the full exploitation process for “Madness,” an easy-level CTF room designed to sharpen your enumeration, steganography, and privilege escalation skills. Whether you’re a newbie or brushing up on core pentesting techniques, this guide will show each key step, the commands used, and the reasoning behind my approach — perfect for those aiming to develop both practical methodology and CTF problem-solving speed.
Initial Enumeration: Nmap & Gobuster
As with any CTF or penetration testing engagement, initial enumeration is crucial. I began with an Nmap scan to discover exposed services and valuable version information. The following command was used:
nmap -sCV -vv <target-ip>This provided insights into open ports, running services, and possible vulnerabilities by using service and version detection flags .