The most important clues should be given in the little help box below the password field. Basically, you should know that every website is made up of a coding language called HTML. Understanding that this language makes up every website should be your greatest clue. The next step will contain the answer to the challenge, so please make sure to exhaust your brain before continuing. If you don’t wind up figuring it out on your own, nothing really happens. You are free to access further missions. In addition, you are free to enter as many wrong answers as you want, nothing will change. However, learning by doing each step will increase your chances of understanding future missions.

Google things—Perhaps not for this particular mission, but the first thing you will be asked by people on the forums is if you “Googled It” before you posted a question, so make sure that you do.

Hold down Ctrl on your keyboard and hit the F key to start a word search of the code. Then paste the sentence above in it and hit Enter. The page should jump right to that sentence in the code, and the password is right below it. It should say something like “the first few levels are extremely easy: password is f0d0751f. ” Copy the “f0d0751f,” or whatever yours says, and paste in inside the password field on the Basic Mission 1 page. Click the “Submit” button to continue. You just finished Mission 1. A new page should load that says “Congratulations, you completed basic 1!” Click the blue “Next Challenge” button down and to the right of this box.

Although many of these people will be nice and friendly, please note that not all will be nice to you. There also may be some who may just drop the answer right away. Please try to remember that you are here to learn these concepts, not just get the answers.

A few good resources to understanding a programming language, like PHP, online would be 3WSchools. It is important to research as you are going through different challenges to learn more about the obstacles in your path. These sites can help you learn a bit about PHP, as it will come up in future challenges.

If you look at the line just above the one that lists the PHP file you should see: “

”. If you go back to your main basic Mission 3 page and look at the current URL, it should read something like https://www. hackthissite. org/missions/basic/3/, but notice that there is no “index. php” on the end. This means that the website is waiting for a specific action to happen before it starts reading the index. php file. The same is true for the “password. php” file. The website is waiting for whoever is typing in the password field to hit the “Submit” button before it reads the password. php file, but you can read it first. Try to figure the rest out then go to the next step.