5 Tips to ADVANCE your HACKING Skills
If you want to become a penetration tester or Red Teamer, then you need to have strong hacking skills. First of all you need to build these skills. Cybersecurity is a broad field with many skillsets to master. After you have build the base foundation of your skills, then you have to maintain your hacking skills, because Cyber Security is a constantly evolving field, so your skills need to be up to date.
In this blog post, I want to share 5 Tips how you can build hacking skills for Penetration Testing and how you can keep them up-to-date.
#1 Play CTFs
Capture the Flags, or CTF for short, are hacking challenges, with which you can acquire new hacking skills, test your skills and sharpen your skillset. These challenges can be from a various amount of domains, such as Web Hacking, Network Penetration Testing, or even Hardware hacking.
During CTFs you will use different Penetration Testing tools and methodologies. Furthermore you can keep yourself motivated during learning, because CTFs are a gamified way of learning Cybersecurity.
Two sites, I can recommend for playing CTF are HackTheBox and TryHackMe.
#2 Read Books
Yes, books can be outdated, but most of them are still relevant. The best part about books is, that they are well structured and give a good overview about a topic. Also books will be reviewed by other authors, so you can quality content.
Furthermore reading books will help you expand you vocabulary and attention span, so you will gain more soft skills. Reading skills are also quite important, because as a penetration tester, you will need to read a lot of code and documentation. So having good reading skills will help you in your day-to-day job.
#3 Watch Hacking Videos and Courses
There are a ton of great YouTuber out there, which create quality content in the domain of penetration testing. For example John Hammond.
Also there are video course plattforms, such as Udemy, where you can buy courses on the specific field you want to learn in Penetration Testing. That investment might pay out soon, when it helps to advance your carreer.
#4 Read Cybersecurity News
In order to have your skill up-to-date, you need to be up-to-date with Cybersecurity news. From the news you can learn about Threat Actors and their TTPs. So you can acquire new skillsets for your next Red Team engagements.
#5 Tinker around
If you have found a cool tools or an interesting topic, then try to dig into the code of the tool or try to test these TTPs in a home lab. So you can get hands-on experience with a new topic. Tinker around and just trying to figure things out for yourself, will help create your creativity. Penetration Testing is a highly creative field, so this will also benefit your carreer.
If you don’t have a home lab, you can easily spin up one with tools, such as DetectionLab.
