HackTricks: a community wiki of security notes

HackTricks (about 12,500 stars on GitHub) began in 2019 as the personal notes of Carlos Polop, who collected what he learned while studying for certifications and playing CTFs. It grew into one of the largest community security wikis and is now maintained by the HackTricks-wiki organisation with many contributors. The repository holds the Markdown source of the book; the rendered version is published at book.hacktricks.wiki with a sidebar, search and translations into several languages. A sister project, HackTricks Cloud, covers cloud platforms in the same style.

What it contains and how it is organised

The wiki is organised like a reference book. Top-level parts cover general methodology, operating-system internals for Linux, Windows and macOS, network services by port, web applications, mobile platforms, cryptography and reversing, and physical and hardware topics. Each page is a working note rather than a polished essay: short, dense, with links to the original research it summarises. The project uses a GitBook-style layout (a SUMMARY.md table of contents that maps to the directory tree), so the GitHub view and the website have the same structure.

Who it is for

• Students preparing for practical security certifications, who use it as a companion to lab exercises.
• CTF players and people learning on platforms such as Hack The Box and TryHackMe.
• Penetration testers on authorised engagements, as a memory aid during an assessment.
• Defenders and administrators who want to understand which configurations are routinely abused so they can harden their own systems; many pages describe the weakness and the fix side by side.

How to browse it

The website is the intended reading experience; use its search or start from the methodology pages and follow the sidebar. To read offline, clone the repository and open the Markdown files in any editor, or build it locally with the tooling described in the repository README. Contributions are accepted through pull requests, and the maintainers ask that new material cite its sources.

Credit

HackTricks was created by Carlos Polop and is maintained by the HackTricks-wiki team and contributors. The content is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 licence; check the licence page in the repository for the current terms before reusing material.

Use it responsibly

Material of this kind is meant for systems you own or have written permission to test, for bug bounty programmes within their published scope, and for training labs and capture-the-flag (CTF) exercises. Unauthorised testing of other people’s systems is illegal in most countries, regardless of intent, and the maintainers of these projects say so in their own terms. Defenders can use the same material to check their own environments and to understand what their detection rules should catch.