across the years, i've received countless messages from people asking how to hack and if i can mentor them. i can't respond to each one individually, so this post will help you get started :3 this will primarily be a list of good resources ive used myself, or recommended by others i know.

fundamentals

before even starting hacking itself, its highly recommended you begin with the fundamentals. these are some of the most essential fundamentals:

you may need to learn more depending on what youre focusing on. that brings me into your goal, which topic you want to focus on:

personally i focus on web application exploitation, network exploitation, reverse engineering, and mobile app exploitation. i recommend starting with web application exploitation, its the easiest in my opinion.

learning the basic fundamentals could take a long time, but its really worth it to really understand hacking. without an understanding of the fundamentals, you cant really understand hacking, thus not being a hacker. i cant guide you through all the fundamentals, but this google drive (archive) contains many resources to learn both fundamentals and hacking itself (created by DaWolfieLegion!)

this post by maia arson crimew also has good resources at the end, as well as its view on hacking and activism inspired by it.

hacking

here is some more resources for learning hacking once youve learned the fundamentals :3

getting into ctfs and practice environments like tryhackme and hackthebox can be good learning tools too, although tbh i rarely used them myself. i always tried practicing on real targets instead of practice environments. imo blogs are one of the most important learning resources for reading about real world hacking experiences.

one of the primary ways i learned was by going down rabbit holes of googling. id look up a hacking method and google anything i didnt understand, and if i didnt understand anything from that then id repeat, over and over again.

opsec

an important part of hacking is operational security, aka opsec. for learning operational security, i recommend these manuals:

theres a lot to opsec, i recommend looking up opsec guides and figuring out what works best for you. i also highly recommend reading about how previous cybercriminals (such as pompompurin and omnipotent) got caught, and learn from their mistakes.

how i learned

i started learning in late 2020, initially inspired by the Anonymous collective's Operation Minneapolis. i didn't start out with the fundamentals, just went straight to learning sql injection and ddos. i was a classic script kiddy at the time, not fully understanding what i was doing, just blindly running scripts. my first *somewhat* big hack was against Association of National Accountants of Nigeria (ANAN) for OpNigeria, although credit was taken by the ddoser Litemods.

my main method of learning was googling something and keep googling down a rabbit hole of whatever i didnt understand, i was obsessed and learned 24/7. eventually with enough obsessive reading and practice, i got an understanding of the fundamentals. later i would learn the fundamentals more "officially" but at the time, i knew enough to surpass most anonymous hackers.

as i sought to learn more, i joined hacking based discord servers and group chats. i met some pretty cool people that way, one of which being MLT from the old group TeamP0ison, and i learned a lot from his blog. i also kept up with infosec twitter and learned a bit from there.

ultimately, what helped me most was practice. specifically real world practice, just make sure you put enough time and effort into opsec before hacking the US govt.

conclusion

i hope this helps guide you to becoming a hacker. i'm hoping for more hackers with the same values as SiegedSec, fighting for the rights of others whilst having fun. in the paraphrased words of Emma Goldman,

"If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution."