Howdy.

I'm currently going through the HackerHolidays 2026 CTF challenge from TryHackMe and am going to post writeups on the journey through it. It will include details such as the setbacks, mistakes, errors as well as the good moves and lessons learned along the way.

For those unfamiliar, TryHackMe is a cybersecurity education platform, a bit like HackTheBox, except I've found them more focused on structured learning flows whereas HTB is more CTF-focused at least the based on the last time I've compared them. THM still has CTF events, however, and this is one of them.

I have plans to write more and more often (for myself and publicly), and have more to say about this endeavor and my experience as an autodidact in general, but I'm not finished writing that post (or those posts?) yet.

By posting this I'm basically tricking myself in continuing to write the rest to conclusion.

Alright. So the first challenge of this particular event, as seems to be tradition, was a very easy freebie of a "challenge". Trick an AI agent to disclose information including the flag, which was not hard to do.
Based on the challenge details, the trick was simply to tell the AI agent in the challenge-provided chat I was one of several privileged persons by name and have it hand me all the information I want on its system rules including the flag.

Full writeup here:

https://nichrome.xyz/writing/hh2026-01-tcktm/

Future writeups will likely be more interesting and substantial. It was just important for me to get one out, even if trivial.

Cheers.