// the find
hmaverickadams/Beginner-Network-Pentesting
Notes for Beginner Network Pentesting Course
The companion repo for The Cyber Mentor's Beginner Network Pentesting course. It holds the lesson plan and per-week homework for an 11-week path that runs from lab setup and Linux basics through scanning, enumeration, and Metasploit, then Active Directory attacks, and finally legal and report writing. It suits someone with no pentesting background who will follow the videos alongside it.
- The sequence builds sensibly: note-taking and Linux first, then reconnaissance, scanning, enumeration, and exploitation, then internal Active Directory attacks. Report writing and the legal side get their own lesson, which many beginner courses skip.
- The lesson plan names concrete techniques a reader can search for next, such as TCP vs UDP scanning, the three-way handshake, LLMNR poisoning, SMB relay, pass-the-hash, kerberoasting, and GPP/cpassword attacks.
- The course builds a Windows Active Directory lab, makes it vulnerable, attacks it, and then patches it. That covers both the red and blue sides, which is less common in beginner material.
- Each week has its own homework folder, so the repo works as a self-paced checklist even without the stream.
- This is the notes, not the course. The real instruction is in the YouTube videos, and each lesson here is a short paragraph describing what the video covers. Without the videos there is little to learn from the repo itself.
- The last push was September 2022. The lab and tooling assume VMware, Kali of that era, and older Windows Server builds, and nothing in the repo says when it was last checked against current versions.
- The directory tree is truncated and shows only the Homework.md files, so I could not see what the homework asks for or how much practice it gives.
- Nothing in the visible tree builds the lab. Setting up a vulnerable Active Directory environment by hand from the videos is the hardest step for a beginner, and the repo gives no scripts or automation to help with it.