Starting My PowerShell CTF Journey: Under the Wire Century Level 0

I’ve been meaning to dive deeper into PowerShell for a while now. It’s one of those tools that keeps showing up in security, sysadmin, and automation work, and I’ve used it here and there, but I wanted to go beyond the basics and actually understand it.

So I decided to stop procrastinating and start doing something about it.

This is the first entry in a series I’m completing. We’re starting with Century Level 0 from Under The Wire, a PowerShell-based Capture The Flag (CTF) game designed to teach and challenge your scripting skills in a hands-on way.

This first level is meant to get you oriented. You SSH into a Windows box and are greeted with a PowerShell prompt and a small objective, usually something involving basic cmdlets or querying system info to find the next password. It’s clean, no fluff, and a perfect way to build muscle memory and intuition with PowerShell.

In the video, I walk through:

• What the CTF setup looks like

• The objective of Level 0

• How to approach the challenge using simple PowerShell commands

• How to retrieve the next password and prepare for Level 1

I’ll be continuing this series, level by level, as part of my own learning journey, and hopefully it’s helpful for others who want to sharpen their PowerShell skills too.

If you’ve never tried a PowerShell CTF before, Under The Wire is a great place to start. And if you’ve already worked through some of the levels, I’d love to hear how you approached them or what you learned.

Let’s keep learning. ⚡