Taking Notes

Taking good notes can save you a lot of frustration. It's not uncommon to find yourself a dozen steps down a rabbit hole for your target machine to disconnect only to realize you've forgotten how to get back to where you were.

Notable Items

Here is a list of things you might want to keep track of:

• Target IPs
• Target scans
• Credentials (even partial)
• CTF flags
• Commands used
• Exploit steps and attempts

Taking notes can be as simple as writing a text file, or as complex as using a dedicated application to organize your notes with something like Cherry Tree.

Output Redirection

Often times its as simple as redirecting the stdOut or stdErr of a command to a file.

Write current directory listing to notes

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ls > [output]

• output filename to write to

Append somefile contents to notes

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cat [somefile] >> [output]

• somefile path to a source file
• output filename to append to

Tool Output

Even though you could easily use output redirection to save tool output, many tools have built in export methods that may offer additional formats better suited for automation:

Save nmap output to a file

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nmap [target] -oN [output] // normal output
nmap [target] -oX [output] // XML output
nmap [target] -oA [output] // all outputs

• target target machine IP
• output base name of the file