Although it may seem hard to believe, cyberattacks share some aspects with terrorism, and one of them is that the attacker only has to be lucky once. That puts all the pressure on those in charge of defense, which may involve you yourself if you maintain a program or a website. That brings us to the free course “Hack Yourself First” by Troy Hunt, which helps developers identify the most important risks in their portals and deploy the necessary fixes.
The Threat Landscape
Whenever we think of a “breather” for computer security, we discover that there is something worse hidden in the shadows. Meltdown and Spectre were two brutal blows, the patches from the main responsible parties leave much to be desired (with serious performance and stability problems), and the idea of having used vulnerable hardware for the last twenty years is more than disturbing. As if that were not enough, there are people and websites that are under attack at this very moment, whether to steal identities, distribute spam, or even mine cryptocurrencies without consent. The latter is very important for those who maintain websites, since miners are reduced to a handful of JavaScript scripts and are easy to hide. So, how do you defend yourself?
What the Course Offers
The free course “Hack Yourself First” by Troy Hunt (creator of the famous site Have I Been Pwned) proposes that developers and administrators go on the offensive, looking for vulnerabilities in their own websites. The full course spans 9 hours and 25 minutes and is divided into multiple short blocks. Its content is aimed exclusively at web developers, and it is based on tools that are surely already very familiar to them. Despite the natural difficulties, the course tries to adopt an agnostic position, so that its suggestions reach the greatest possible number of frameworks.
Narration and Subtitles
Finally, I must add that the narration of “Hack Yourself First” is excellent, and it has Spanish subtitles, a fundamental resource for those moments when English becomes a bit dense and closed. The course was first uploaded in August 2013, a detail that may convey a certain sense of age, but it has very solid feedback, and let's not forget that there is always room to learn something new.
