The idea behind 'HackerForce' emerged from a growing frustration with the marked dilution of technical content in cybersecurity education. The material felt sloppy, at times outright wrong, and rushed, as though organisations were racing to produce as many courses as possible in an increasingly monopolised market, desperate to be first whilst quality got left in the dirt.
It soon became clear that this commercial imperative was coming at the expense of depth. The market had begun to glamorise technical content through pretty interfaces, packaging it up and treating it like a children's activity book, bearing no resemblance to what practical experience had taught. Knowing cybersecurity to be far removed from that, something better was demanded, not a gamified experience dressed up as training.
Alas, finding nothing on the market that met those standards, the decision was made to take matters into hand and create content that was not just demonstrative but genuinely instructive, explaining the underlying principles rather than simply regurgitating techniques. And so the idea of HackerForce was born.
The initial plan appeared deceptively straightforward. Write just over a dozen courses spanning wireless, red teaming, blue teaming, and some coding disciplines, build labs reproducing legacy and contemporary configurations, and publish them to a bespoke, and now thinking of it, riddled with vulnerabilities platform.
After a year or so, the courses and labs were only half written. Content had become outdated without notice, and perfectionism led to endlessly refining courses simultaneously. It was less 'strategic iteration' and more 'recipe for madness'.
The first iteration failed spectacularly. Still, persistence is a key trait of any security enthusiast, both mentally, in learning something until it makes sense, and technically, in maintaining system access. With wounds licked and lessons learned, the approach was recalibrated with a sharper focus.
With a narrowed focus, exclusively on red teaming for now, and drawing on years of practical experience, the work began on building 'Red Cell Operator I', or RCO I for short, covering a complete assessment from planning and OSINT to C2 with Sliver, Active Directory attacks, and reporting.
For the labs, artificial difficulty and contrived footholds were rejected outright. CTFs are great fun over the weekend, spending hours reverse engineering a binary for a flag, but real production environments have organic misconfigurations and human error, not meticulously engineered attack paths designed to stroke egos. With that in mind, the labs, through their dynamism, mimic practical network 'structures', not just 'systems'.
Still small, with a long road ahead. But proud of what has been built so far, and with the community's support, the goal remains to one day offer the best content out there, for beginners and experts alike.
