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🧠 Process Tree Tangle: Can You Kill the Right PID?

🧠 Process Tree Tangle: Can You Kill the Right PID?

Ever wondered what really happens when you run kill -9 on a Linux process? In Process Tree Tangle, your job is to trace the Linux process tree and target a rogue process β€” without bringing down the rest of the system.

Each node in the tree represents a Linux process, complete with process ID (PID) and parent/child relationships. Some processes are critical (like init, sshd, and apache2), while others aren’t. One of them is secretly a rogue cryptominer consuming resources β€” can you find it and terminate it safely?

πŸ” How It Works

  • Explore the rendered process tree
  • Click on a node to “kill” that process and its children
  • Lose points for killing critical processes unnecessarily
  • Gain points for smart targeting

This tool is built to help sysadmins, developers, and aspiring SREs better understand relationships between Linux processes, and the real-world risks of misfiring a kill command.

Try it now at: https://allthesystems.com/process-tree-tangle/

🧩 Looking for more challenges?

My name is Skylar Pearce, I have been working as a System Administror since 2013 as well some side consulting work. During my career I have worked with everything from Active Directory and vCenter to configuring routers and switches and phone systems, documenting and scripting my way through the whole thing. I have a Security+ certification and am currently working on my PenTest+. Throughout my career I have gained almost all of my knowledge from blogs like this. It is now time for me to pay it back. Over time I have gathered scripts and tricks over the years that I will share on this site. A lot of the posts here will be mainly reference posts, some will be full on how to’s. I am happy to go into more depth on any other topics I go over here, just make a comment on a post. I will do my best to post once a day on weekdays but as I run out of ideas it may slow down. My WordPress skills are still growing so the site will likely get better over time as I learn. You can reach me at contact@allthesystems.com or on LinkedIn