As you may know, I’ve been working on my penetration testing skills over the past couple of years taking some courses here and there to help me along the way. All of these courses have been super cheap within $5-60 which has been incredible but as per usual I have purchased way too many courses as my curiosity for the better of me.
The courses I have purchased are as follows and here’s what I think of them:
EC-Council – CodeRed
- Wireshark for Ethical Hackers – If you’ve got any IT proficiency don’t bother with this, you’ll get frustrated at watching the videos and seeing the trainer stumble through the course. It almost feels like he’s learning it himself in some places.
- The Complete Python Hacking Course: Beginner to Advanced – Is pretty good and great if you can get it for $5 like I did. Teaches you all about Python which is a great learning experience.
- Black Hat Python: For Pentesters – Not a bad course but save your money and buy the one above this.
- Zero-Trust – Great if you need a high-level overview of what the zero-trust model is. Worth the $5 if you can get it at that price.
- Reverse Engineering (Part 1 & 2) – Don’t really remember much on these two but they have good reviews on the platform so if you want to get into reverse engineering these may be good for you.
- Reverse Engineering and Memory Hacking with Cheat Engine – Really don’t bother with this. It’s got good reviews on the site but I really struggled with why this course existed. The instructor just went through the Cheat Engine tutorial which you can go through yourself.
- Practical Cyber Threat Intelligence – This course is really good if you’re a manager trying to understand the lifecycle of Cyber Threats. There is some technical stuff in there but it’s really high level.
- Learn to Create AI Assistant (JARVIS) with Python – This course is OK. Once you get past chapter 3 which is setting up the Text to Speech functionality the rest of the course is just setting up the individual methods/functions for what you want “JARVIS” to do. There are much better courses available on the internet for this that use ChatGPT making the system way more flexible as such I wouldn’t bother with this one.
TCM Security
- Practical Ethical Hacking – This course is amazing loads of really good stuff in there relating to ethical hacking and what you would likely be doing should you be in the penetration testing field for a day job. Well worth the $35.
- Open-Source Intelligence – Another great course by TCM looking at parts of penetration testing that typically go overlooked. Some great exercises show how much information is readily available on the internet.
- Practical Malware Analysis & Triage – This was one of my favourite courses to date, something a bit different for me, the only downside was it took me nearly six months to get through it. Part my laziness, part work getting the way. Would highly recommend this one.
- External Pentest Playbook – I brought this in the heat of the moment trying to pass my PNPT thinking I had missed something. The course isn’t bad but I feel you get just as much information from the Practical Ethical Hacking course just from a different angle.
Zero Point Security
- C2 Development in C# – This course is awesome if you’re into programming. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed going through this course and picking up all sorts of techniques that I’m implementing in C# for the day job. I’ve enjoyed the course so much that I’ve continued developing my C2 network in C# and am even considering paying for the Red Team Ops course as I enjoyed learning from this instructor.
Udemy
- Offensive C# – This course, where do I start, the instructor sounds like he’s at the end of a long tunnel when recording as such it’s quite difficult to understand what he’s saying at times. The course itself isn’t bad and there are a few pieces of code that I’ve taken and added into my C2 development. I would say unless you can get this for cheap or free I wouldn’t bother as one of the first things he does is creates a C2 service in Python….
Hack the Box
- Certified Penetration Testing Specialist – This course I’ve only just started and whilst it’s enjoyable so far the material is aimed at beginners who have only just started on Penetration Testing. All the courses and books I’ve read over the past couple of years are a bit of a detriment here and with me wanting to take the CPTS exam at some point you are required to go through the entire course which isn’t good for anyone who’s got some experience.
As you can I’ve gone through quite a few courses over the past year. I would say all in all I’ve spent about £250 for all of this which in terms of investment I would say is pretty good.
Random IT Stuff 