Elite Hacker (Live Cybersecurity Certification Program)

Security makes sense only once the network does. This module covers how computers, operating systems and the internet actually work, the models and addressing schemes behind every attack you will later run, and how to read traffic instead of guessing at it.

• How computers, operating systems and the internet work
• OSI and TCP/IP models
• IP addressing, subnetting, MAC addresses
• HTTP and HTTPS, DNS, DHCP, FTP, SSH, SMTP, ARP, ICMP
• Firewalls, routers, switches, VPNs, proxies, NAT
• Wireshark basics and packet analysis

You will work on both sides of the fence all program long, so both operating systems get proper time: Linux internals and the command line, Windows services and Active Directory basics, and the virtual lab you will use for every later module.

• Linux file system, permissions, users, processes
• Bash commands on Kali, Parrot and Ubuntu
• Windows registry, services, PowerShell basics
• Active Directory basics
• Virtualisation with VirtualBox and VMware
• Building a home lab from zero

Enough code to automate your own work and to read someone else's. Python for scripting and sockets, bash and PowerShell for the systems you are on, SQL and basic web code for the vulnerabilities you will test later.

• Python basics, sockets, requests
• Automation scripts for repeat tasks
• Bash scripting
• PowerShell basics
• SQL basics
• Reading simple JavaScript and PHP

The vocabulary and frameworks that every interview and every report relies on: risk and attack types, the cryptography that protects data in transit and at rest, access control, and the industry frameworks used to structure security work.

• CIA triad, threats, vulnerabilities, risk
• Attack types and terminology
• Hashing, symmetric and asymmetric encryption
• Digital signatures, SSL and TLS
• Authentication, MFA, access control
• NIST, ISO 27001, MITRE ATT&CK

Hacking without methodology is guessing. This module sets the phases every professional engagement follows, the legal boundaries you work inside, and the practice targets you will use for the rest of the program.

• Types of hackers and the legal side of testing
• Reconnaissance and scanning
• Gaining and maintaining access
• Covering tracks and reporting
• Lab setup: Kali Linux, Metasploitable, DVWA
• Hack The Box and TryHackMe practice

Most of a real engagement is reconnaissance. You will learn passive collection that leaves no trace, active scanning that maps services accurately, and how to read vulnerability scanner output critically instead of trusting it blindly.

• Passive recon and OSINT
• Google dorking, Shodan
• theHarvester, Maltego
• Active recon with Nmap and Netcat
• DNS enumeration
• Vulnerability scanning with Nessus and OpenVAS

From a foothold to full control. Password attacks and hash cracking, service enumeration, exploitation with Metasploit, and the privilege escalation paths that turn a low privileged shell into administrative access on Linux and Windows.

• Brute force and dictionary attacks
• Hydra, John the Ripper, Hashcat
• SMB, SNMP, LDAP and NetBIOS enumeration
• Exploitation with Metasploit
• Privilege escalation on Linux and Windows
• Persistence and post exploitation concepts

Attacks that target the network itself rather than a single host, and the controls that detect or stop them. Everything here is performed only inside your isolated lab network.

• Sniffing and ARP spoofing
• Man in the middle concepts
• DNS spoofing
• DoS and DDoS concepts with defences
• Session hijacking
• IDS, IPS and firewall evasion concepts

The human layer and the payload layer. How phishing and pretexting are built for awareness testing, the families of malware you will meet in a SOC, and safe sandbox analysis of suspicious files.

• Phishing, vishing and pretexting
• Awareness and controlled simulation
• Virus, worm, trojan, ransomware, RAT
• Static analysis in a sandbox
• Dynamic and behavioural analysis
• Indicators worth extracting

The largest module in the program, and the one most bug bounty and VAPT work lives in. Every OWASP Top 10 category is covered manually first so you understand the bug, then with tooling so you can work at speed.

• OWASP Top 10 end to end
• Injection, XSS, CSRF, IDOR, SSRF
• Broken authentication, XXE, insecure deserialisation
• SQL injection manually and with sqlmap
• Burp Suite, OWASP ZAP, ffuf, Nikto, Gobuster
• File upload, LFI and RFI, command injection
• Business logic flaws
• Authentication and session testing

Modern applications are mostly APIs, and APIs break differently from web pages. You will read and manipulate real requests across REST, SOAP and GraphQL, and work through the OWASP API Top 10 with hands on testing.

• REST, SOAP and GraphQL request structure
• OWASP API Top 10
• Broken object level authorisation
• Mass assignment and rate limit abuse
• Testing with Postman
• Intercepting API traffic in Burp Suite

The professional wrapper around the technical work: how engagements are scoped and agreed, how severity is justified, and how a report is structured so a developer can fix the issue and a manager can sign it off. This is the skill that separates a tester from a hobbyist.

• Scoping, rules of engagement, NDAs
• Vulnerability assessment against penetration testing
• Black box, grey box and white box testing
• Web, network, mobile, cloud engagements
• Risk rating with CVSS, CWE and CVE
• Executive summary and technical findings
• Proof of concept and remediation advice
• Retesting and closure

Internal and external network testing the way it is done on a real engagement, including the Active Directory attack paths that show up in almost every corporate assessment, and the hardening review that follows.

• Internal and external network pentesting
• Kerberoasting and Pass the Hash
• BloodHound and lateral movement
• Firewall and configuration review
• Server hardening
• Remediation guidance for infrastructure findings

Wireless gets a full module because it is the one attack surface almost every organisation exposes physically. All practical work is performed on your own access point inside an isolated lab, and every attack is followed by its defence.

• Wireless standards 802.11 a, b, g, n, ac, ax
• WEP, WPA, WPA2 and WPA3
• Monitor mode and packet capture
• Handshake capture, cracking and PMKID
• Evil Twin and Rogue AP
• Deauthentication attacks and WPS weaknesses
• WPA2 Enterprise and captive portal attacks
• Defence: WPA3, WIDS and WIPS, segmentation

Android application security taught across three focused classes, from architecture and lab setup, through static and dynamic analysis, to runtime manipulation and a written mobile VAPT report, closing with a short overview of iOS security.

• Class 1: Android architecture, sandbox, permissions, APK structure
• Class 1: app components, emulator and rooted device lab, OWASP Mobile Top 10
• Class 2: decompiling APKs with apktool and jadx
• Class 2: manifest review, MobSF scanning, hardcoded secrets, insecure storage
• Class 2: Burp Suite proxy setup and traffic interception
• Class 3: Frida and Objection, SSL pinning and root detection bypass
• Class 3: exported component testing with Drozer
• Class 3: practice on InsecureBankv2 and DIVA, mobile VAPT report, iOS overview

How a Security Operations Center actually runs, what each analyst tier is responsible for, which log sources carry the evidence, and how attacker behaviour is mapped so detections can be built around it.

• SOC structure: L1, L2, L3 and incident responders
• What an analyst does in a shift
• Windows Event Logs and Syslog
• Firewall, proxy and EDR logs
• Cyber Kill Chain
• MITRE ATT&CK mapping

Hands on with the tooling a SOC lives inside. You will ship logs into a SIEM, write your own queries and correlation rules, build dashboards and learn the triage discipline that keeps a queue under control.

• Splunk, Elastic (ELK), Wazuh, Microsoft Sentinel
• Deploying and onboarding log sources
• Writing queries and alerts
• Correlation rules and dashboards
• Alert triage workflow
• False positive tuning and escalation

What happens once something is confirmed. The full incident response lifecycle, phishing and malware triage, indicator enrichment from threat intelligence sources, proactive hunting, and the forensics basics used to reconstruct what happened.

• Preparation, detection, containment
• Eradication, recovery, lessons learned
• Phishing email analysis
• Malware triage in an incident
• IOCs, VirusTotal, MISP, AbuseIPDB
• Threat hunting hypotheses
• Disk forensics with Autopsy
• Memory forensics with Volatility

The defensive stack in practice: endpoint detection, network intrusion detection and prevention rules, traffic monitoring and baselining, and what honeypot data can tell you about who is knocking.

• EDR and XDR in practice
• Snort and Suricata rules
• Network monitoring with Zeek
• Traffic baselining
• Honeypots and their data
• Where each control fits in a defence in depth design

Most workloads now live in someone else's data centre, and most cloud breaches come from configuration rather than exotic exploits. This module covers the misconfigurations that matter and the container basics you need to test modern deployments.

• AWS, Azure and GCP misconfigurations
• IAM and privilege boundaries
• Storage and S3 exposure
• Docker basics for security testing
• Kubernetes basics
• Common cloud hardening checks

A conceptual close to the program: how real red team operations are structured, how command and control works, why evasion is an operational discipline rather than a trick, and how purple teaming turns an exercise into lasting detections.

• Command and control concepts
• How operators plan an engagement
• Evasion concepts at a conceptual level
• Adversary emulation
• Purple teaming
• Where to go next after this program