Hands-on Hacking

About this course

Updated in May 2025. This course now features Coursera Coach! A smarter way to learn with interactive, real-time conversations that help you test your knowledge, challenge assumptions, and deepen your understanding as you progress through the course. Get ready to level up your ethical hacking skills with Hands-on Hacking, a highly practical course designed to sharpen your penetration testing capabilities across real-world scenarios. From reconnaissance and vulnerability discovery to privilege escalation and exploit development, this course offers an immersive journey through the full spectrum of offensive cybersecurity tactics. By the end, you’ll confidently navigate through complex systems, uncover security gaps, and simulate advanced attack techniques. The course begins with foundational exercises on system scanning, enumeration, and initial access, moving through scenarios involving HTTPS traffic decryption, Burp Suite proxying, and exploiting web services like Apache Tomcat. Each section builds progressively, reinforcing your knowledge through CTF-style vulnerable machines, including GoldenEye, Bob, and Misdirection. You'll learn to think like a hacker, building your technical and investigative instincts. Next, dive deep into custom exploit development using fuzzing, buffer overflows, and payload crafting, followed by multi-stage hacking environments like WinterMute. These scenarios test your pivoting skills, privilege escalation methods, and real-time adaptation to layered defenses. You'll even tackle Windows AD systems, jail shell escapes, and SQL server exploits, gaining versatility across platforms. This course is ideal for aspiring penetration testers, red teamers, and cybersecurity enthusiasts with a basic understanding of networking and Linux. Some experience with command-line interfaces and scripting (like Python or Bash) is recommended. The course is intermediate level and balances guided instruction with self-driven challenge.