Or you could just follow hayabusa's advice and contact MySpace and have them get rid of it for you, instead of violating MySpace's Terms of Use Agreement.

Instructions on how to delete your MySpace profile: http://www.myspace.com/help/safety/parents/profile

Congratulations!

ncrack is actually no longer under development (http://seclists.org/nmap-dev/2012/q3/605). Hydra and medusa are still supported, so we'll continue to see bugfixes and enhancements.

Here are some comparisons on their performance:
http://www.thc.org/thc-hydra/network_password_cracker_comparison.html
http://www.foofus.net/~jmk/medusa/medusa-compare.html

Thanks again, and congratulations to the other winners

It's only secure if you take additional measures to protect it. Use SSL with IMAP and encrypt your hard drive.

You can get away with writing basic exploits with basic knowledge of C and assembler, and some python or perl. If you're new to programming, python is a good start. Read up on assembler in the background and once you're familiar with python, start learning some C.

Get yourself a copy of Windows XP to practice on:

Here are some resources to start with:
https://www.corelan.be/index.php/2009/07/19/exploit-writing-tutorial-part-1-stack-based-overflows/

http://resources.infosecinstitute.com/author/lupin/

http://resources.infosecinstitute.com/debugging-fundamentals-for-exploit-development/

I want to link you to Joe McCray's slides from his presentation on exploit research for those just starting out, but it looks like the slides and videos aren't up yet. In any case, they'll probably end up here: http://www.slideshare.net/joemccray

Disassociating clients is just a temporary measure that the client can easily work around. Better to just secure the AP itself to prevent these people from connecting. If the ISP expects you to secure it, tell them to give you admin access, or have them send someone with admin access to deal with it.

The chapters on exploit development in PWB are actually very well done. The material Joe talked about is similar, but not quite in as much detail as the way muts explains it in the course. I was hoping for more on the advanced stuff as well, but otherwise, I thought it was a good webinar. Definitely looking forward to more.

Best way to practice privilege escalation is to do it. Get a hold of vulnerable virtual machines like Kioptrix and De-ICE and root them. The PWB labs are also a great place to practice privilege escalation. The labs are for you to learn and make mistakes, so take advantage of that.

Just got notification that the date has been changed to Friday, Sep 14, 2012 1:00 PM - 3:00 PM EDT

This course is meant to be difficult, and I think those of us who've earned our OSCPs like it that way. The difficulty and hands-on aspect is what separates it from other certifications. Dumbing the course down waters down the reputation of the certificate.

You need to be able to think quickly, out of the box, and pull rabbits out of your hat. The exam will test you on that. Think of it as a black box test on an organization. No hints, no information before you step in. That's part of the challenge. Everything you learn in the lab, and out of the lab, will come in handy.

You could just go to each distro's website and look at the description. Some distributions pack as much as they can to make a "it just works" solution, others prefer a barebones approach. Others prefer to release only stable software and no bleeding edge stuff makes it through. Others are pure bleeding edge only. Package management is another big thing, and so is support (has it been tested on a Mac, is is good for large deployments, how easy is it to maintain, etc).


Some links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_distribution
http://distrowatch.com/

Not sure what blogs you're reading. There are blogs geared towards penetration testing written by professionals. You can always just read RFCs and white papers.

The course gives you the fundamentals. It's up to you to take it to the next level.

You're right, you can't learn or master anything from just one example. That's what the lab is for. Practice on it, make mistakes, learn from your mistakes. More importantly, expect to spend a lot of time doing research outside of the course material if you intend to hack into all the machines in the lab and pass the exam challenge.