I'm a Site Reliability Engineer for work (I have a strong background in Linux, Networking, and Coding) and I have also been involved in infosec stuff on the side as a hobby for many years. This game is really interesting, I can definitely see how this could teach some fundamentals to people who want to learn the basics.

There were a few things that personally annoyed me though, or which I felt could have been done better:

1. You can't pipe to grep, which I feel is a huge missed opportunity here, especially from a teaching standpoint. If I'm doing an "ls" and listing out a directory with a long list of files in it, I'd really like to be able to do "ls -la /home/me/tools | grep nmap" to see if the file that I'm looking for is in there. This would also be useful when running tools or scripts to only output the info that I want to see. This would also go a long way towards teaching Linux fundamentals to people. I probably use grep more than just about any other commands (except maybe cd and ls) in my day to day Linux work. It was kind of disappointing to not find the capability in here.

2. When doing an "ls -la" that's the only order that it will accept those options in. I'm personally used to doing an "ls -alh" so I end up doing "ls -al" and it doesn't like that. It should accept the options either way, it doesn't make any sense to make it so rigid.

3. Other basic commands are missing such as "w" or "who" to see who is currently logged into a system, "df" to see filesystem utilization, "free" to see memory utilization, uptime to see system uptime and load, uname to see kernel version, etc.. It would be nice to have some of that stuff in there to make the hosts feel more complete. I'd really like it to feel more like I'm on an actual Linux box and less like I'm in a simulation sandbox.

4. sudo doesn't behave like sudo because it doesn't take the current user's password (except on your own computer). This was counter-intuitive for me an an experienced user. I kept trying to use the regular user's password and when that didn't work I tried using "su" to switch to root, but "su" doesn't exist. In the interest of realism you should consider having sudo use the current user's password and outputting some error if they don't have access to use sudo, and adding an "su" command to switch to the root user if you know the root user's password.

5. The ability to do something like "echo 'some text' > filename.txt" and "echo 'some more text' >> filename.txt" would be super useful. Often times I want to quickly jot something down in a file and it's tedious having to open the Notepad.exe app every time.

6. I would also really like to see a terminal style editor (something like nano but even simpler) so that I don't need to keep opening up Notepad.exe which is cumbersome. I would much rather be able to just do something like "edit <filename>" and make the edit in the terminal window like you'd generally do in the real world.

7. The built in scripting language doesn't seem to really follow any modern standards in terms of the formatting. It kind of reminds me a little bit of BASIC but it's not that. It's kind of tedious to have to learn a whole new scripting language for the game, especially when it doesn't carry over into anything useful in the real world. Many of the players coming to this game are doing so to learn and it would make a lot more sense if you implemented bash and/or python style scripting into this (it can't be that difficult to do, with python especially). That way people are learning things that they can actually use outside of the game.

8. In the Map screen, it would be nice if there were the ability to type in a label/name for each of the computers to more easily remember what they are. Same goes for the bookmarks in the browser, being able to rename them instead of just having IPs or URLs would be very useful.

9. When using the sudo command it requires full paths for any files being referenced, even if you're already sitting in the directory where the file is. For instance if I'm sitting in /home/me/analyze and there's a file in there called passwd, if I do "sudo /home/raw/tools/decipher passwd" it says the file isn't, found. If I then specify the full path to the passwd file in the same command it works. This isn't the way this behaves in Linux in real life and this should be fixed as it's an unnecessary hassle. I could also see this being terribly confusing to inexperienced users/players.

I really love the idea of this game but I wish it felt more authentic and that the scripting was done in a relevant language to the real world. Those things aside I think this is a legitimately good learning tool for people who want to get into infosec in the sense that it does a pretty good job of teaching the logic involved in stepping through different hosts in a network and targetting different services and vulnerabilities on those hosts.

is very complete, the hacking is legit but old, a lot of outdated techniques so far, and I am a Unix/Linux person so is frustrating that commands like ls and Nmap etc are limited and do not fully emulate the real commands like ls you cant do ls -alh you have to do like it or not ls -la in that order when Unix you can do flags in any order ls -al for example should also work, with Nmap you can't scan a subnet like the real one instead you limited to one IP and one type of scan, etc.. but for a game and a MMORPG is very good I recommend maybe we can help developers so they make it a bit more modern in techniques and realistic in Unix commands... like in Unix we do not have .exe <- they are ELF files also missing a CLI editor like vi or at least nano .. please ADD vim ;)

im a python programmer,and i know bash and cmd.
however i lacked major networking skills,i only have 1 pc,and a modem.
grey hack solved this issue,you can play with networks freely.
buy new computers, servers all that stuff.
you can make you own scripts/programs just like in real life.
even html websites....this is a great game.....
this is the best training tool out there as far as i know.
its pretty hard to learn but everything is in the manual,and the game mimics linux.
++you can apply the skills you learn here in real life.
if you want to do this in real life,install linux,learn bash,python,and html.
windows is a bit diffrent,but it all comes from DOS.
for windows cmd/powerhsell .bat,and powershell scripts + python and html.
this game is a fun place where you can freely hack each other.
also learn to protect yourself IRL.

Very realistic hacking simulator. MMO, which is awesome. has a programming language built in which is based on miniscript, which is awesome. procedurally generated internet and networks. nightly build includes devices like cell phones, smart appliances, etc. very advanced simulation, very fun. pvp and pve, karma system for black hat vs white hat hacking, can host your own websites, services, etc. Can create your own crypto currency and trade it with other players, can run your own online shops, code repositories, ftp servers, etc.

Only if you already know programming. No proper tutorial. No proper online videos. No resource to show or walk someone through the basics. It seems like it could be fun if you're already familiar with the subject. I recommend because I won't downgrade because of my ignorance in a subject. Just be real with yourself and be willing to do some real research to make progress because it's near impossible to only use Grey Hack videos and resources to get you through this.

Not so realistic that you are overwhelmed, but good enough for you to have fun and understand the concepts. The multiplayer element is what makes this game even more fun. - SOC Analyst and avid gamer

not very friendly to new players, toxic player base run off new players before they even get a chance to start doing missions, they also give no advise or help

I don't know what's going on in this game. Just like another certain hacking game, it starts with a long, very promising tutorial.

At the end of the tutorial you're told about "exploits" but not why to use them or how to use them. When you get into your first real mission and have to use them, expect to get stuck. Someone on Grey Hack's discord told me what kind of exploit I'd need, and they couldn't tell me how I'd learn that from the game, they said they probably learned it from a guide.

Once I could successfully connect to a target system with that knowledge learned from a guide and not from the game, it led me to a .db database file that I'd need to somehow edit, but the game never told me how to do that, you can't just notepad it. Eventually the admins or whatever discovered my activities and gave me 3 warnings before ending my game.

I tried to cover my tracks the way the tutorial told me to by editing the log file, but the log file didn't allow me to make edits no matter what I did. I could view my connections to the target computer, but I couldn't delete them. The tutorial makes a very specific point to tell you not to delete the file, but without any other options, I tried to delete the file anyway, and the log file has read-only access preventing you from deleting it even if you wanted to, even if it meant this gives you away.

So I restarted my game, my notes about the mission were gone (oops, I didn't save the notepad file because I was warned earlier by the game that I'd ran out of hard drive space trying to download an exploit file during my very first mission), and it seemed to allow me to pick up where I left off. This time, I was now able to open the exe file on the target computer that lets me read and make changes to that .db file. Hooray!

Except wait a minute, now that I've made the change the mission asked me to make, the mission didn't complete. Missions are given to you in emails, but this email, unlike the tutorial mission email, didn't ask me to reply with a password or anything like that. Er, is it automatic? It can't be, because I completed the mission. Should I send a reply? Sure, I reply with "done", even though I know only the game is listening. I get a response email saying the mission isn't completed yet. What? Yes it is. I log back in with another unauthorised login and re-check, my change to the database is still there. It definitely saved. It definitely has the correct details. But mission not complete.

The game currently has no sound.

This is an early access game, the steam store page says it was released in 2017, and there is a roadmap posted in 2018. I think the version of the game I'm on is v0.8.5121a. v0.6 was the version released in 2017.

It is an exciting game. It has a steep learning curve, but if you are not against spending some time doing some research, it is a very worthwhile game to play.

Really hard game to get started and get the hang of but once you learn how to use everything this game is awesome. Defs reccommend getting this.
Could use a better Tutorial and more hlp though.