> Have you ever had to debug a "blackbox" before, Application code or hardware that you had really nothing to do with and had to figure out how in the hell it works?

I suppose so, yes, but probably not to the extent required in some of these challenges.

I just read through https://cybersecurity.att.com/blogs/security-essentials/capt... and some of the accompanying write ups[0] on Github which was very insightful.

[0]: https://github.com/1337pwnie/ctf-writeups/tree/master/2017/U...