This series of walkthroughs aims to help out complete beginners with finishing the Pre Security Path on the TryHackMe (thm)1 website.
It is based on the learning content provided in the DNS in detail room.
Task 1 - What is DNS?
Check out the DNS introduction.
Question 1: What does DNS stand for?
Domain Name System
Task 2 - Domain Hierarchy
Did you know, that there are TLDs like flowers, mango and yoga? Inform yourself about gTLD, ccTLD, second-level domains and subdomains.
Question 1: What is the maximum length of a subdomain?
63
Question 2: Which of the following characters cannot be used in a subdomain (3 b _ -)?
_
Question 3: What is the maximum length of a domain name?
253
Question 4: What type of TLD is .co.uk?
ccTLD
Task 3 - Record Types
Read about the different DNS Record types and their functions.
Question 1: What type of record would be used to advise where to send email?
MX
Question 2: What type of record handles IPv6 addresses?
AAAA
Task 4 - Making A Request
Inform yourself about the potential steps, and the order they are taken, once a request to a domain name is made.
Question 1: What field specifies how long a DNS record should be cached for?
TTL
Question 2: What type of DNS Server is usually provided by your ISP?
recursive
Question 3: What type of server holds all the records for a domain?
authoritative
Task 5 - Practical
Use the static site that is provided in this task to make the different DNS queries.
Simply select DNS Type (#1), and enter the subdomain (#2) you want to query. It will automatically adjust the command in the command line.
Notice, how we only specified shop as the subdomain when we make the query for the CNAME belonging to the shop.website.thm.
And when we query for the website.thm’s TXT record, we leave it completely blank.
We do the same, when we make the query for the MX record.
The command used above:
nslookup --type=CNAME shop.website.thm
| command name | description |
|---|---|
| nslookup | query Internet name servers interactively |
| type=value | This keyword changes the type of the information query to value. The defaults are A and then AAAA; the abbreviations for these keywords are q and ty |
| shop.website.thm | [name] |
With this, we arrived at the end of the room.
Question 1: What is the CNAME of shop.website.thm?
shops.myshopify.com
Question 2: What is the value of the TXT record of website.thm?
flag
Question 3: What is the numerical priority value for the MX record?
30
Question 4: What is the IP address for the A record of www.website.thm?
10.10.10.10
thm - shorthand for TryHackMe from now on ↩︎