Hacking Skills Challenge Level 1

The other day, I proposed you test out your ethical hacking skills over at HackThisSite. If you didn’t see that post, take a look now: How Are Your Hacking Skills? As promised, I’m publishing my comments and approach to the solution.

Level 1, dubbed “The Idiot Test,” requires that you enter the correct password into a password field in order to continue to the next level. The name itself seemed a giveaway to me, so I started with the obvious, a blank password, and simply clicked the submit button. No joy. Next, I tried ten of the most popular weak passwords in use (take your pick as to which “Top Ten” list you prefer):

password
root
admin
123456
qwerty
abc123
letmein
changeme
password1
asdfjkl;

None of these worked; it appeared as if the test was going beyond the idiot level. If it’s that simple, it should be obvious, so I took another look at the screen and noticed another subtle clue: “If you have no idea what to do, you must learn HTML.” Hmm. Maybe the page source has a clue. I opened the page source and searched for “password.” Bingo! I found this in the code:

<!-- the first few levels are extremely easy: password is 1e79cde6 –>

Did you figure it out? Hit the comments and let me know.