Hakluke’s Ultimate OSCP Guide: Part 2 — Workflow and documentation tips

Man walks through door with large shadow. OFFENSIVE security logo dramatically appears in a red abyss.

At the start of my labs, I wasn’t really prepared for how much documentation I would be writing. I opted to document ALL of the exercises and 10 lab machines (while this is not compulsory, it earns you an extra 5 points in the exam). On top of that, I also documented the exam boxes. In total, this came to around 280 pages. Within the first couple of weeks, my reporting process changed dramatically, and I wasted a lot of time getting a good workflow happening.

Hopefully, you can make the most of your lab time by learning from my mistakes. Read on, fellow hackers!

Environment

The Virtual Machine

Offsec provides you with a modified Kali Linux virtual machine. I’m not going to run through setting it up here, but I will say this:

The virtual machine provided by Offsec is meant to be run with VMWare, not VirtualBox.

Generally, I’m more of a VirtualBox guy. It’s free, and I like Vagrant. Unfortunately, converting a VMWare VM to VirtualBox, and vice versa, is dodgy. If you’re using Linux or Windows as your host machine — you’re in luck! Download VMWare workstation for free and install away. Unfortunately for Apple users — you will need to buy VMWare Fusion, or convert the Kali PWK VM…