CTFs and Wargames can help people their improve command line and hacking skills.

The Bandit wargame from OverTheWire is aimed at absolute beginners. It is a game you connect to through SSH that will help you will improve your command line skills, your linux skills, and you hacker skills.

We just published a course on the freeCodeCamp.org YouTube channel that will provide you with a complete walkthrough of the 34 levels that are part of the Bandit wargame.

Sabyasachi Paul created this tutorial. He has a lot of experience in the field of cybersecurity. Sabyasachi will guide you through the series of security challenges involving the Linux shell, remote connections, and SSH.

Before watching each challenge solution, consider first trying to solve each challenge yourself.

In this command line game, you start at Level 0 and try to “beat” or “finish” it. Finishing a level results in information on how to start the next level.

If you are following along with the game yourself, you may encounter many situations in which you have no idea what you are supposed to do. There are several things you can try when you are unsure how to continue in the game (before watching the solution).

First, if you know a command, but don’t know how to use it, try the manual (man page) by entering man <command>. For example, man ls to learn about the “ls” command. The “man” command also has a manual, try it! When using man, press q to quit (you can also use / and n and N to search).

Second, if there is no man page, the command might be a shell built-in. In that case use the help <X> command. For example, help cd.

You can find instructions for the game here: https://overthewire.org/wargames/bandit/

Watch the full walkthrough on the freeCodeCamp.org YouTube channel (2-hour watch).