Free Ethical Hacking Resources
--
Ethical hacking (also known as pen-testing or penetration testing) is a term that covers the intruding practices aiming to discover any threats and significant cybersecurity vulnerabilities that can be found and exploited by an malicious attacker.
Generally ethical hacking is broken into two seperate but complimentary skillsets: web application penetration testing and network penetration testing. One focuses attacking a targets computer networks via known exploitable weaknesses, the other focuses in discovering and exploiting sofware code vulnerabilities. Either way, the end goal is to discover and leverage vulnerabilities, via exploits to establish a foothold in your target environment, doucmenting
My goal with this article is to curate a list of the best freely accessible tools, training & educational resources, and demos to empower all those learning, honing and continuously developing their ethical hacking skillsets and toolkits. The majority of these I’ve found via Twitter, directly from GitHub, or via recommendations from courses or colleagues.
I will also include some affiliate links, marked LikedThis¹, which link to the best books I have found on various hacking-related topics.
Foundational Understanding of IT:
First and foremost, you NEED to have secured your foundational understanding of networking and host technologies, so at least have the content of the CompTIA A+, Network+ and Security+ covered. Honestly, hands down the best please to cover these courses for free is via the free online training provided www.professormesser.com
From there, progress to the SANS Cyber Aces (securing your foundational knowledge in IT): https://tutorials.cyberaces.org/tutorials.html
Because I’ll be referencing several Github repos, it’ll help to know what Github is and how to use it. Until I get around to writing such a guide, I invite you to leverage this awesome github HowTo by Edureaka. You can check out their Youtube channel also for lots of cool tech training and education.
Books:
- CompTIA PenTest+ Certification All-in-One Exam Guide (Exam PT0–001): https://amzn.to/3nHVS8f ¹
- Black Hat Python, 2nd Edition: Python…
