A Review on PentesterAcademy Suscription
When we talk about Pentester Academy we usually think about its Red Team Labs, which according to some people are one of the closest labs to real environments together with Rastalabs RTO, but what about its suscription?, its been there for a long time, some people recomend some of the courses, but in general I haven’t seen people talking much about it, my one year suscription has just expired so I wanted to talk about my experience with it, and try to help some people to decide if they want to get a suscription. Let’s start with some statistics of the courses:
Python for Pentesters: 52 videos, started on 2012 - 05 - 28
Attacking and Defending Active Directory: 36 videos, started on 2019 - 01 - 26
Windows Process Injection for Red-Blue Teams: 14 videos
x86 Assembly Language and Shellcoding on Linux: 37 videos, started on 2013 - 01 - 21
x86_64 Assembly Language and Shellcoding on Linux: 51 videos
Javascript for Pentesters: 42 videos, started on 2014 - 01 - 29
Linux Forensics: 106 videos, started on 2015 - 05 - 31
Pentesting with Metasploit: 27 videos, started on 2014 - 08 - 25
Wi-Fi Security and Pentesting: 77 videos, started on 2014 - 08 - 24
Exploiting Simple Buffer Overflows on Win32: 30 videos
USB Forensics and Pentesting: 40 videos, started on 2015 - 01 - 14
Pentesting iOS Applications: 46 videos
Make your own Hacker Gadget: 14 videos, started on 2014 - 08 - 22
Scripting Wi-Fi Pentesting Tools in Python: 13 videos, started on 2014 - 08 - 14
GNU Debugger Megaprimer: 14 videos
WAP Challenges: 118 videos, started on 2013 - 09 - 09
Pentesting Challenges: 15 videos, started on 2014 - 04 - 08
PCAP to XML and SQLITE: 4 videos, started on 2015 - 03 - 16
Airodump-NG Scan Visualizer: 5 videos, started on 2015 - 03 - 28
Web Application Pentesting: 82 videos, started on 2013 - 08 - 29
Network Pentesting: 83 videos, started on 2013 - 09 - 24
Powershell for Pentesters: 74 videos
Windows Forensics: 118 videos, started on 2015 - 12 - 07
Data Science and Machine Learning for Infosec: 50 videos, started on 2017 - 02 - 09
WinDbg Fundamentals: User Mode: 23 videos
WinDbg Fundamentals: Kernel Mode: 14 videos
Abusing SQL Server Trusts in a Windows Domain: 16 videos, started on 2018 - 01 - 01
Embedded/IoT Linux for Red-Blue Teams: 28 videos, started on 2018 - 03 - 06
OSINT: Fun with Open Source Intelligence: 20 videos
Pandas for Pentesters: 22 videos, started on 2016 - 10 - 28
Wi-Fi Monitoring for Red-Blue Teams: 11 videos, started on 2017 - 06 - 05
Windows API Exploitation Recipes: Processes, Tokens and Memory RW: 15 videos, started on 2017 - 02 - 12
Hacker Project: SMS Controlled Pentest Bot: 8 videos, started on 2018 - 01 - 31
Getting started with Pentesting using the Raspberry Pi: 7 videos, started on 2018 - 06 - 22
Traffic Analysis: TSHARK Unleashed: 15 videos, started on 2018 - 06 - 29
Memcache Reconnaissance for Red-Blue Teams: 8 videos
WMI Attacks and Defense: 19 videos, started on 2017 - 10 - 31
Reverse Engineering Linux 32-bit Applications: 44 videos, started on 2018 - 06 - 27
Reverse Engineering Win32 Applications: 53 videos, started on 2018 - 06 - 27
VoIP Traffic Analysis: 26 videos
Windows Red Team Lab: 8 videos
ARM Assembly: 17 videos, started on 2019 - 01 - 07
Windows System Programming: Fundamentals: 19 videos
Linux Rootkits for Red-Blue Teams: 15 videos
DevSecOps: Insecure Docker Registry: 2 videos
Reverse Engineering for ARM Platforms: 8 videos
There are 46 courses with a total of 1546 videos in Pentester Academy at the moment.
As wee see currently there are 1546 videos on the platform, the suscription allows you to download 100 videos per month, so you can’t get all the courses with one year suscription, in any case you just have to get the ones that you are interested in, the starting date is a value that I got from a public video of the course that was publicly available on youtube, so rather than the starting date is the upload date, and the courses can be older than that. Seeing the date you can think that some courses are too outdated to be useful anymore, but the basic doesn’t change with time, and yeah, these courses are no meant to take from zero to knowing all about a subject, but even if you aren’t new on the field you can always learn something from them.
Without a suscription you can’t see the videos of the courses, but you can check the details of them and the titles of all their videos, with that you can have an idea of what and what not a course will teach. For example let’s take python course, as you can guess it’s made with python2, it teaches from the basic and some automation with it, anyways you can take it and follow it with python3, since there isn’t a lot diffence on its basic sintaxis. So what about Web Application Pentesting, again a kinda old course, but as I said it doesn’t mean it’s a useless course, it starts by explaining some basic stuff about HTTP, that if you learnt from current courses you might have skipped, and understanding the protocol better always helps, it talks about all the basic vulnerabilities that you would expect, and something I really liked, it teaches js, sometimes we just learn about xss, and how to pop up an alert box without being able to do anything else with JS, so having an introduction to how to use it is really good, and speaking of JS it has a Javascript Course, which more than a course are challenges to perform certain stuff with JS, as I said many of us just learn to pop up a box, add it to the report, or if we are doing bug bounty save it for later to chain it with another vulnerability to increase the impact, but here we can see some interesting actions that JS can perform, by example a keylogger or modify the page content, and if it is on the scope of a pentest it can come handy to know.
So going to some courses that I really liked, TSHARK Unleashed, where we learn to use tshark to analize traffic on a really efficient way, allowing us to get better results than only using wireshark (yeah tshark is basically wireshark for terminal, but you can get a lot from it, I even had the oportunity to use what I learnt to troubleshoot some issues on a company), Powershell for Pentesters, is another course that I liked a lot, it helps you to going from knowing nothing to feel confortable using powershell, are you worried that it could be kinda old like some other courses?, well even on the course that specterops used to give they tried to use powershell v2, why?, because you can get to some old system (or try to use powershell v2 to avoid some new security features), so writing script compatible with PSv2 is still a good idea, now with the main reason I got suscribed, Attacking and Defending Active Directory, I knew AD was important, but wasn’t able to find a begginer course to how to approach to it, and this course is awesome, because it not only teaches you how to attack AD, it teaches how it works, so you end up understanding better all the environment, the only complain I have and I’ve heard the same about the red team labs, is that it’s too windows focused, yeah you don’t use linux at all, so you won’t learn to use the impacket tools, evil-winrm, ldapsearch, and all kind of really useful tools like those, it’s all about “powershell magic”, anyways is a great learning material. Other courses are worth mentioning are, VoIP Traffic Analysis, WMI Attacks and Defense, USB Forensics and Pentesting and x86_64 Assembly Language, I haven’t had time to watch the last two (I have them downloaded for the future), but I gave them a quick look, and I liked all the explanation that they give, also all the reverse engineering courses and windbg look good, but I’m not a fan of binary explotation and reverse engineering, so I can’t say much about them.
That would cover the most important courses I guess, but that’s not all that the suscription gives you, when you suscribe you also get access to Attack Defense Labs, you can register for free and get access to some free labs, and check what the labs have to offer by yourself, and no, these labs are not only labs to practice what you learnt from the courses, there is completely new content on it, for example, labs for wi-fi attacks, I didn’t put much attention on the course since I knew most of it, but being able to practice and have extra stuff to the course was awesome, docker, with some basic concepts of docker (and some softwares related to it), and methods of scaping from a containers, a great amount of privilege escalation techniques on Linux, some methods of maintaining access on Linux (I think many of us practice on boxes inside HTB, THM, vulnhub, etc), so usually maintining access is not something we care about, and here we can learn some really simple yet effective ways of don’t losing access to the machines, Json Web Tokens, there you have a lot of labs about them, and some CVEs with applications that use them, AWS, they have set some accounts on AWS so you can explore by yourself the cloud of amazon, they’ve been adding some windows labs, but right now they are heavily based on msf, I like msf, but it would be great if they teach how to do all that with and without msf, the same with all pivoting related labs.
Probably it was also due to quarintine, but this was the year that I learnt the most, probably not all the courses are the best that you can find (for example rather than the Web application course I would go to portswigger academy), but if you’re still learning about this field I think it’s worth getting a suscription, furthermore they add content almost every month, so you will get to learn everything new they put.