h4ckercademy: an inside look at the online hacking academy

If you've landed here wondering what exactly this is and whether it's worth your time, here it is without the sales pitch.

What h4ckercademy is

An online academy for ethical hacking and cybersecurity. Hands-on, recorded, structured courses on pentesting, OSINT, Kali Linux and hardware hacking, with your own lab and a verifiable certificate at the end.

There's no company with a marketing department behind it: I run it, afsh4ck. I record the courses, write the command cheat sheets and answer the forum questions. That has one advantage and one limit, and I'd rather state both: the content is made by someone who does this for a living, and in exchange the catalogue grows at the pace of one person.

How the courses are built

Every course follows the same structure, because it's the one that works:

A lab before anything else. No theory for six lessons. The environment gets built in the first ones and everything after that runs on top of it.

Downloadable commands in every lesson. Nobody learns a command by watching it in a video: they learn it with the command in front of them while they type. So every lesson ships its cheat sheet — copy block by block, download it as .md to keep on a second screen, or jump to the matching section of the Ethical Hacking Cheatsheet, the GitBook where I maintain the full reference.

A forum per course. Questions get answered where they come up, and they stay there for whoever arrives next with the same one.

A verifiable certificate. Completing a course issues a certificate with a public code. Anyone — a company, a client — can check it on the verification page without needing an account.

The catalogue, and where to start

Start here if you're coming from zero

The Kali Linux course is free and complete. It goes from an empty virtual machine to a full audit: lab with VMware, moving around the terminal, recon with Nmap, attacking network services like FTP, SMB and RDP, exploitation with Metasploit and writing the final report.

It's also published on my YouTube channel. What you get by watching it here is the ordered syllabus, the command cheat sheets, the forum and the certificate — which requires watching it on the platform with an account, though no subscription of any kind.

It's also the best possible test: if you finish that course and want more, this is for you.

After that

• Hack The Box — a systematic method for solving machines instead of trying things at random. Beginner level, but with the Kali one done.
• Flipper Zero — hardware hacking: radio frequency, NFC, infrared, BadUSB. Intermediate, and one of the specialisms with the fewest people and the most demand.
• Advanced OSINT — open source investigation: infrastructure, people, leaks, geolocation and the final report. Advanced level.

And more on the way, among them WiFi hacking and phishing.

What the subscription includes

A single subscription gives access to the entire catalogue, to any new course published while it's active, to the forum and to certificates for everything you complete. Courses aren't sold separately — the whole idea is the opposite: that price doesn't decide what you learn.

The details and the two billing options are on pricing, with a 14-day refund guarantee.

The legal part, which is serious

Everything taught here is practised in your own lab or on platforms that expressly authorise being attacked. In Spain, unauthorised access to a computer system is a criminal offence even if you break nothing and even if you meant to tell the owner.

It isn't a disclaimer added out of obligation: it's the difference between this profession and a serious problem, and that's why it appears in the first module of every course.

Where to keep reading

If you're deciding whether to get into this, these three articles answer most of it:

• How to become an ethical hacker from scratch — the full route, with real timelines.
• What an ethical hacker earns in Spain — ranges by level and what actually raises your pay.
• Cybersecurity certifications — which to take and in what order.

And if you've already decided, the free Kali Linux course starts with an empty lab. See you inside.