HXT – A lovely cybersecurity online course

In this post, I share my experience with hextree, an online cybersecurity course currently in early access.

I joined the waiting list after watching videos on LiveOverflow’s YouTube channel. I love the style, the voice, and the level of detail. I’ve completed the web security section of the course, and it’s been fantastic. Here’s why:

The platform is designed like a game, with a map featuring continents of expertise, challenges, badges, and a leaderboard. You progress through the continents tile by tile. Each tile covers a specific topic with several small tasks and an explanatory video. While there is some text, the courses are primarily video-based.

For the web security continent alone, there are six lab environments. You can launch your personal instance and start analyzing or attacking it to collect flags. Or, depending on the task, you follow the instructions and work on your local machine. The challenges to get the flags come in varying difficulty levels. Some were straightforward, just applying the techniques explained. Others required real effort and multiple attempts and took hours to solve.

I enjoyed the courses!

I’m excited to see what the other continents, like the Android one, offer. You can check them out — some courses are free, and you can inspect the topics before purchasing.

The videos are concise and to the point, with minimal detours. All important terms are mentioned and briefly introduced, making the courses suitable for beginners and experienced participants. You get the key information for each task and can decide how much additional research to do. If you’re familiar with a topic, you can speed up the video playback.
I learned something new in almost every video. It was great to discover new examples and dive deeper into the material.

I can wholeheartedly recommend the courses from hextree.