MonkeHacks #51

Payoff, Statistics, Languages

Author

Monke
February 08, 2025

MonkeHacks #51

We’re nearly at the 1-year milestone of MonkeHacks! I’ll make the next issue a great one, and I might do a giveaway of some kind. I had a pretty standard week - I went bouldering, and I went to the gym. On Thursday, I went to a language exchange to practice my spoken German and Arabic, and I met some great people there, so I’ll definitely go again next week. Time is flying by.

Great sunset from the city :)

Weekly Ideas / Notes 

  • True to my prediction, I’ve started finding a few bugs with the assistance of my automation. It’s not quite fully automated - these are findings on assets that were picked up by my code, but the hacking process was still manual.

    • As much as I’d like to talk more about what I’m automating, it’s an area I don’t want to bring attention to, so you’ll have to forgive me for omitting it. I still need to make a living!

  • I split my time between coding and active hacking, so I ended up with several bugs this week. It was a nice change from just coding for the past month.

  • I got two great pieces of news this week that I can’t share, but you’ll find out in a few months. 2025 has been an insanely good year for me so far - like, so good that I didn’t see this coming at all.

  • There’s a lot of power in knowing different languages. Not just day-to-day, in speaking with people, but also in hacking. Knowing a language unlocks more scope - yes, you can use Google Translate to translate the entire page a lot of the time, but there’s a lot of areas where knowing how to read a particular language is a superpower. Reversing code with variable names that have been written in another language, for example.

  • I might do another 100-hour challenge or some other kind of challenge soon. I’ll make a poll on X soon!

Resources

The list is a bit short this week, but the Portswigger article should keep you very busy!