Network Security & Ethical Hacking
Let's start network security from the ground up, from both the attacker's and defender's perspective — 25 lessons that walk you step by step through legal/ethical boundaries, Nmap, Wireshark, and the OWASP Top 10, all the way to Metasploit, Incident Response, and professional reporting (everything here is built around an authorized lab environment only).
25 Lessons · 220 min · Learning Platform Editorial Team
What you need on the desk
- VirtualBox/VMware (virtualization software)
- A Kali Linux VM + Metasploitable/DVWA (lab target VM) — or a TryHackMe/HackTheBox account
- Wireshark, Nmap (pre-installed in Kali Linux)
Know this much before you start
- Basic comfort with the command line/terminal
- A basic understanding of networking concepts (IP address, port, DNS) — you can also pick this up from the site's AWS/Terraform tutorial
- Basic Linux command line skills (it helps to have gone through the site's Linux tutorial first)
By the end, you can
- Explain Network Security using the CIA Triad and both the attacker and defender perspectives
- Respect legal/ethical boundaries while performing authorized recon/scanning with Nmap/Wireshark
- Understand the OWASP Top 10, password security, and common vulnerability categories
- Design defensive controls using firewalls, network segmentation, and IDS
- Understand Metasploit (in an authorized lab), privilege escalation concepts, and the incident response lifecycle
- Complete a lab network assessment and server hardening project, wrapped up in a professional report format