Cybersecurity White Hat Hacking v10

For IT leaders: Attackers look for misconfigurations and weak controls across web servers, databases, networks, and applications. Teams that have never worked through an attack themselves often miss these gaps. This course trains security staff to find those weaknesses with authorization, before someone else does.

Role fit: This course is built for IT Practitioners and security analysts with at least a year of pen testing experience. It also suits experienced security staff who want to confirm their skills. Newer team members will benefit from a foundational course first.

Time investment: Plan for about 21 hours across 17 skills per learner. The instructor recommends a steady 10–15 minutes a day, so Team Leads can set a study schedule that fits around operational work.

Risk and governance: The training stresses signed authorization before any reconnaissance. It also stresses practicing only in isolated environments, away from production systems. Later modules cover operations security controls, incident handling, disaster recovery testing, and security awareness training. Those topics connect offensive findings to defensive policy.

Change-management note: The wireless hacking overview points learners to related demos in the Penetration Testing with Linux Tools course. Pair those modules with your team’s current wireless assessment toolset and approved testing procedures.

How CBT Nuggets supports it: Learners start by building a virtual lab, so they can practice hands-on without putting production at risk. Lab-focused guidance and iLabs help teams repeat techniques in controlled environments.

IT teams use this training to think like an attacker, so they can find and close gaps before someone else exploits them. Keith Barker grounds each phase in authorized, scoped engagements, from permission through reporting, so your team practices offensive techniques in a safe, legal lab instead of production systems.

• Catch misconfigurations before attackers do. Your team learns to use passive and active reconnaissance, network scanning, and OS fingerprinting to map live devices and identify weak spots attackers target, including vulnerable services and applications with injection flaws.
• Validate defenses against real attack paths. Demonstrations cover attacker methodologies such as reconnaissance, social engineering, system hacking, phishing, SQL injection, and remote access scenarios. This helps Team Leads tighten monitoring, strengthen credential practices, and reinforce endpoint controls.
• Assess expanding attack surfaces. Practitioners examine common attack categories, types, and vectors, then connect them to core security practices such as MFA, centralized identity management, SSO, physical security controls, and backup strategies.
• Turn findings into stronger operations. A case study connects pen test results to fixes: security awareness training, incident handling, recovery from malware or rootkits, disaster recovery testing, and business continuity planning.

The course starts with building an isolated practice lab, so practitioners can rehearse these techniques safely before applying them in sanctioned assessments.

Knowledge

• The five phases of hacking, including the difference between passive reconnaissance — public records, search, and news releases — and active reconnaissance against an authorized target
• How attackers exploit misconfigurations and application-level vulnerabilities such as SQL injection, cross-site scripting, buffer overflows, session hijacking, and denial of service
• Common malware types and Trojan capabilities, and how easily users can be tricked into installing malicious software
• Wireless fundamentals, including RF basics, topologies, and BSS concepts, plus the attack surfaces that IoT, mobile, and cloud technologies add
• Defensive controls covered in the case study: OWASP input validation, routing protocol authentication, security awareness training, incident handling, and disaster recovery testing

Ability

• Build and configure an isolated virtual hacking lab so team members can practice techniques without putting production systems at risk
• Run footprinting and network scans to find live devices, fingerprint operating systems, and enumerate potential vulnerabilities
• Demonstrate password attacks such as rainbow table generation with RainbowCrack, and explain how attackers gain remote access and cover their tracks by manipulating logs
• Practice authentication bypass and injection attacks in the OWASP Broken Web Application Project
• Explain wireless attack risks, including rogue access points and man-in-the-middle scenarios, within authorized lab environments
• Turn test findings into recommendations — such as stronger input validation, error handling and logging, employee training, and incident response procedures — that strengthen the organization’s security posture