Welcome to ThinkerSec!

So you want to get into hacking, cracking, red teaming, blue teaming, penetration testing, or just hop into the information security industry and you’re not sure where to start? Worried you’ll never be good enough?

Everyone starts from zero, and now’s as good a time as any to get started. All you need is:

• Time
• Curiousity
• Willingness to read

Why is reading so important? You’re going to spend the rest of your life reading. Whether you’re a hacker, penetration tester, defender, or whatever, you’re going to be spending quite a bit of every day reading something.

You might read news or incident reports about recent security events to learn about the root cause, either to defend against it at your org or how to exploit it at a target org.

On any given day you might read logs, command output, bug reports, patch notes, source code, obfuscated malware, SPAM, phishing emails, whitepapers, RFPs, documentation, man pages, training materials, and who knows what else.

Reading for comprehension and detail is a critically important skill.

Here’s three easy steps to getting started:

1. Spend at least an hour every day reading about a technology, technique, or watching a seminar or podcast. Find something new to learn.
2. Spend at least an hour every day practicing what you’ve just studied and write about it.

Learning, applying, and writing helps build skills quickly, and you'll have a written record to refer back to for your own benefit and to share.

If you spend at least two hours learning and practicing you’ll build skills quickly. If you can put in 4 – 5 hours you’ll get into Deep Learning mode which supercharges your brain into making new connections and epiphanies.

You can find a boatload of tutorials and book reviews here and I’ll link to useful resources around the web.

Happy learning!