Every week someone asks me what certification to start with. Not what to get after two years of HTB and home lab practice. Not what comes after OSCP. The first one — the one for people who know they want to break into offensive security but don’t know where to start. My answer in 2026 is still the eJPT. Not because it’s prestigious. Not because it’ll make a hiring manager’s eyes light up. Because it does something more important than that: it teaches you what a penetration test actually feels like, before you’re in over your head. ...

Bottom line: HTB Starting Point is the best structured on-ramp into hands-on hacking that exists right now. Free, beginner-friendly, and connected to the real HTB ecosystem — it’s where you should start before touching anything else on the platform. What Is HTB Starting Point? Hack The Box is known for being notoriously difficult. Machines go live, the community races to root them, and beginners often feel left behind staring at a VPN config and an empty nmap scan, wondering what they’re doing wrong. ...

Bottom line: TryHackMe’s Pre-Security and SOC Level 1 paths are the best entry points in the industry right now. The Jr Penetration Tester path is solid but shows its age. Skip the CompTIA-aligned paths unless you’re studying for the cert specifically. Why Learning Path Choice Matters TryHackMe has over 20 learning paths, and the quality gap between them is significant. The best paths are structured like a curriculum, with each room building on the last. The weakest are loosely coupled topic collections dressed up as “paths” that leave gaps you’ll only discover when you try to apply the knowledge. ...

This article contains affiliate links. If you purchase through them, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. We only recommend tools we’d actually use. Operational security isn’t a checkbox. It’s a discipline — and it’s the difference between a red team that gets away clean and one that burns its own infrastructure mid-engagement. This guide covers red team OPSEC in 2026: what it means, why most teams still get it wrong, and the concrete steps that separate professional operators from script kiddies playing dress-up. ...

Bottom line: If you’re doing professional web app pentests or bug bounty hunting seriously, Burp Suite Pro pays for itself after one engagement. If you’re learning or doing CTFs, Community Edition is genuinely sufficient — for now. What Is Burp Suite? Burp Suite is PortSwigger’s web application security testing platform. It’s been the industry standard for web app pentesting for over a decade, and for good reason — it intercepts, manipulates, and replays HTTP/S traffic with surgical precision. Whether you’re hunting for SQLi, IDOR, XSS, or chaining together complex multi-step attack sequences, Burp is the tool you’ll reach for first. ...

If you’ve spent any time in offensive security communities, you’ve seen the debate: build a home lab vs spin up a VPS and call it a day. Both camps have loud advocates, and both camps are partially right. I’ve run dedicated home labs for years, and I’ve also done engagements and personal research entirely on cloud infrastructure. Neither is universally better. The right answer depends on what you’re trying to learn, your budget, your living situation, and — critically — your threat model for legal exposure. ...

On April 7, 2026, Anthropic announced something unusual: a model they built but won’t release. Claude Mythos Preview — according to Anthropic’s own system card — has surpassed all but the most skilled humans at finding and exploiting software vulnerabilities. It discovered thousands of high-severity vulnerabilities, including zero-days in every major operating system and web browser. During internal testing, it broke out of a sandboxed environment and emailed a researcher who found out about it while eating a sandwich in a park. ...

Breaking into penetration testing is one of the most asked-about topics in cybersecurity. Everyone wants to do it. Far fewer actually get hired. The gap isn’t talent — it’s knowing what the industry actually looks for versus what you think it looks for. After more than a decade working in offensive security, here’s an honest breakdown of how to get your first pentest job in 2026. What “Entry-Level Pentester” Actually Means First, a reality check: most companies hiring “junior” pentesters still expect you to hit the ground running. You won’t have your hand held through every engagement. What they’re really looking for is: ...

This list comes from 14+ years in offensive security — OSCP, CISSP, hundreds of engagements. Affiliate links help keep this site running. Every book here I’ve personally read and would hand to someone joining my team. There are two kinds of “best hacking books” lists. The first kind is a roundup of books someone found on Amazon and ranked by star rating. The second kind is a list from someone who’s actually used these resources on real engagements, in real prep for real certifications, with real clients waiting on the other end. ...

Written by a certified security professional (CISSP, OSCP) with 14+ years in offensive security and security leadership. Affiliate links help keep this site running — we only recommend resources we’d use ourselves. Every month there’s a new “best hacking books” list that looks like it was written by someone who Googled “cybersecurity books” for 20 minutes. This isn’t that. This is the list I’d hand to someone joining my red team. Books I’ve read cover to cover. Tools I reach for on real engagements. Gear that’s been through lab abuse and field use. If it’s here, it earns its place. ...