This page defines the formatting standards used across this blog to ensure consistency and readability in CTF walkthroughs.

Text Formatting

UI Elements

  • We use italics for menu items, buttons, or tabs.
  • Example: Select Network from the sidebar.

Hyperlinks

  • Standard underlined links are used for external tools or platforms.
  • Example: TryHackMe

Sensitive Data

  • Passwords, credentials, tokens, and keys are highlighted in red, bold, monospace text to make them stand out.
  • Example: password123

Placeholders

  • Angle brackets indicate values that you need to replace with your own.
  • Example: nmap -sV <target-ip>

Keyboard Shortcuts & Inline Code

  • We use backticks for keys, short commands, file names, paths, and endpoints. To make them easy to spot, these appear in a slightly smaller font with a distinct background and rounded corners.
  • Example: Press Ctrl+C to stop the process, or check the config.yaml file.

Code & Terminal

Interactive Terminal

Full terminal sessions (including the prompt) appear in blocks with a themed background and a thick teal top border. The prompt is specially highlighted so you can quickly spot where a new command begins.

user@kali:~$ whoami
root
user@kali:~$

Static Code Blocks

For scripts, payloads, or longer snippets of code, we use language-specific blocks.

# Example Bash Script
echo "Hello World"

Figures & Layout

Standard Images

Figures are bordered, centered and can include a caption for clarity.

Figure 1: Downloaded challenge archive and verification checksum

Figure 1: Downloaded challenge archive and verification checksum

Clean Images

For diagrams that should blend into the page without borders, we use a specialized info box.

Decrypted PNG image containing the Side Quest 4 key

Listings & Logs

Logs, directory structures, and raw output are displayed in dedicated text blocks.

/home/user/
├── flag.txt
└── secrets/
Listing 1 - Directory Structure

Captions

Captions for images, tables, and lists are provided based on context. We include them when they add necessary value, but omit them when the content is self-explanatory.

Communication

Quotes

We use the standard Markdown blockquote for citations or theoretical explanations.

“The goal of this challenge is to exploit a buffer overflow in the stack.”

For short references or specific phrases mentioned within a sentence, we use standard double quotation marks like this:

  • As was written, “no mans land”, so we decided to pivot.

Questions & Answers

We use an H3 header to separate the Q&A section of a challenge.