Penetration tester launches free security bootcamp

A Melbourne penetration tester has created a bootcamp along with a series of free hacking exercises to help security professionals sharpen their skills.

PentesterLab offers students and professionals a series of vulnerable web applications to hack in tandem with educational resources. 

The site was recently upgraded with a burgeoning 12 week bootcamp course which tasks wannabe security pros with practical coding and hacking exercises, and points them to research tools. 

Louis Nyffenegger created the site to share some of the exercises he produced as part of his training courses.

"The exercises are intended for anyone who wants to jump on the penetration testing wagon or wants to start learning and understanding security," Nyffenegger said.

"My main goal is to teach people security the right way: hands-on training with detailed explanations and perform exploitation manually.

"Some exercises are more advanced and target the experienced penetration tester [whereas] everyone can use bootcamp : students, developers, system administrators."

Nyffenegger said the bootcamp is designed to help geeks navigate the plethora of existing security resources with the concept that it is better to first learn about a given technology prior to poking it for security holes.

The courses are free for individual use and under a commercial license for corporates who want to integrate it into their security training.

It is similar to exploit-exercises, a series of security tests developed in tandem which hones skills in privilege escalation, vulnerability analysis, exploit development, debugging and reverse engineering.

He said the response to the exercises had been strong and thanked industry peers who gave feedback on the courses. 

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