Hacking is doing something that wasn't meant to be done.  Or perhaps a better way of putting it is to say that when the designer designed their product, they were not thinking of our method of interaction. 

When the login form below was designed, the idea was that a decent person would visit this site with the intention of logging in with their credentials.

I go back and forth between working on various problems and when a hard problem wears me down, I work on something easier.  That's where Blocky comes into play. 

It seems they move boxes in and out of the Retired section of HTB because I don't even recall its name.  I do know that I was working on another box, went through the weekend without touching it, and when I went back to it that following Monday, it was inactive.  

Anyway, so Blocky went from Nmap scan to root in no time purely because of a solid guess.  I sometimes just poke at something for the sake of covering all of my bases but it doesn't normally bear fruit.  This time it did and I was completely taken aback.  More on that in a bit.

First we kickoff an Nmap scan:

I was working on a project and while looking at the randint function, I suddenly thought about blackjack.  It makes sense -- you have a function, randint, that generates a random number.  So I open a terminal and after a little side deviation, I'm generating a couple of cards.  I realize a few things I'm missing and I build it out a bit further.  Then even further.  Each time realizing that there's more to this little game project than I had anticipated.  I finally decide to stop at this version you see below.

There are a couple of things to note here -- first, my dealer cheats.  That's intentional.  The second thing to note is that I didn't take into account that an Ace can be worth one or 11.  I could go back in an assign values to variables but then this would grow further and that wasn't really my point.  

As always, my Python is pretty weak so don't critique me.  I don't use it for much other than single functions hence the very small hacky scripts you see here.  One day I'll build something... one day...