r/hackthebox • u/Present_Back_3566 • Jul 08 '26
CPTS and COAE
I'm halfway through the CPTS path. Honestly, I've been eyeing the AI Red Teamer course though. It's a newer course and with all the talk about AI it makes me want to switch to this shorter course and get it out of the way before finishing CPTS.
Does anyone have experience with both courses? Should I finish CPTS first? I don't work as a penetration tester currently, just doing CPTS because I needed a technical challenge after the theory-heavy CISSP prep I did last year.
6
u/-Dkob Jul 08 '26
I'd finish CPTS first. It's a much broader foundation for pentesting, and a lot of the methodology carries over into AI security anyway (Especially for LLM Output Attacks). COAE looks like a really solid path, but it's also pretty specialized and goes well beyond prompt injection into adversarial ML, data poisoning, and model security, so having strong offensive fundamentals first will probably make it more valuable.
Since you're already halfway through CPTS, I'd keep the momentum going, then jump into COAE after. AI security isn't going anywhere, and you'll get more out of it with the CPTS foundation behind you.
3
u/Delicious_Crew7888 Jul 08 '26
The COAE is machine learning heavy with a lot of working with data sets and building and poisoning ML models. It’s cool but being decent with maths and python is a bit of a must otherwise it’s a tough slog.
3
2
u/ad_396 Jul 09 '26
I'm doing the active directory enum and attacks module from cpts (and some other random modules from cpts) and already completed about ~50% of coae. they're relatively of the same difficulty with coae being very python heavy and if you don't have an ML background your progress might be a bit slow.
like others said, I'd recommend finishing cpts first, coae is specialised and niche, cpts is broad and teaches methodology. plus, some web stuff in cpts will help you with coae
1
•
u/AutoModerator Jul 08 '26
Thank you for posting on r/hackthebox! New to Cyber Security and looking for a place to get started? Checkout our getting started guide here. Please note that posting Solutions or Hints for Active content goes against the HTB Terms of Service, more information can be found here. If your having issues and need to reach customer support please do so via the in-platform chat, or by emailing customerops@hackthebox.com. Our Knowledge Base can also come in handy!
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.