The Attacker's Playbook
How people actually get hacked — the whole attack, from the reconnaissance before anyone touches you to the extortion at the end, told as one story through real breaches. Every stage is paired with the thing that stops it, usually early and cheaply.
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"Hackers" is not one thing. An automated scanner, a ransomware crew and a nation-state want different things, can do wildly different things, and are stopped by wildly different things. Knowing which one is aimed at you is where every sensible decision starts.
1 lesson · 4 min
Before anyone touches your systems, they read. Attackers assemble a picture of you from what is already public — your domains, your staff, your leaked passwords, the metadata in your own documents — and most of it, you gave away without noticing.
1 lesson · 3 min
The way in is almost never the dramatic one. Ranked by how often each actually starts a breach, the front doors are a phished click, a reused password, an unpatched box, and a trusted supplier — in roughly that order, which is not the order the films taught you.
1 lesson · 4 min
Getting in is the expensive part, so a serious attacker makes sure they never have to do it again. Persistence is the quiet business of leaving a way back — a new account, a scheduled task, a stolen token — that survives a reboot, a password change, and often the clean-up itself.
1 lesson · 3 min
Attackers rarely land where they want to be. They land as a nobody — a single low-privilege account — and climb. Privilege escalation is that climb, and it usually runs on the things a tired administrator left lying around, not on a clever exploit.
1 lesson · 3 min
One compromised laptop is not one compromised laptop. It is a place to stand while reaching for the next machine, and the next, until the attacker holds the whole network. Lateral movement is why a small foothold becomes an organisation-wide emergency.
1 lesson · 3 min
The end of the story is where the attacker gets paid. They take the data out, and then they turn it into leverage — sold, ransomed, or held over you with the threat of a leak. Understanding the payday is how you make yourself a bad investment.
1 lesson · 3 min
Walk back through the whole attack and something hopeful appears: the attacker had to win every round, and you only have to win one. The links break earliest and cheapest near the start — which is where a handful of ordinary habits stop most of the story before it begins.
1 lesson · 4 min
Labs
Hands-on challenges for this course. Each one hides a flag you have to find.