[!NOTE]
In the field of Information Security, understanding the enemy, the hacker, is crucial. By knowing your enemy, you can effectively defend and secure the digital world.
[!TIP]
"Know the enemy, and you can defeat the enemy."
In the USA, even high-ranking retired police officers continue to advise residents on how to better secure their homes. They visit houses and identify weak points, sharing their knowledge of the criminals' techniques to help prevent break-ins.
To hone your cybersecurity skills, you need to keep your hacking skills up-to-date. To achieve this, a safe, legal, and free environment is necessary for practice.
This list compiles websites that offer various opportunities to practice your cyber skills. Each site has a unique approach, and a brief description is provided to highlight its focus.
📘 Some sites offer tutorials to guide you
🧭 Others encourage self-directed exploration
🔄 The list is regularly updated — bookmark it or watch for new sites
If you are missing a site not mentioned in the list, feel free to contribute.
[!IMPORTANT]
Every site in this list is 100% free, legal, and safe to practice on. Each entry is tagged with a category emoji and a difficulty badge (🟢 Beginner / 🟡 Intermediate / 🔴 Advanced).
Use the categories legend below or Ctrl+F to jump to what you need.
🆕 NEW — Free training platform created by bug bounty hunter zseano, teaching how to find and report web application vulnerabilities in real bug-bounty programs.
buggy web application, is a free and open source deliberately insecure web application. It helps security enthusiasts, developers and students to discover and to prevent web vulnerabilities. bWAPP prepares one to conduct successful penetration testing and ethical hacking projects.
Damn Small Vulnerable Web (DSVW) is a deliberately vulnerable web application written in under 100 lines of code, created for educational purposes. It supports the majority of (most popular) web application vulnerabilities together with appropriate attacks.
Damn Vulnerable Linux (DVL) is everything a good Linux distribution isn't. Its developers have spent hours stuffing it with broken, ill-configured, outdated, and exploitable software that makes it vulnerable to attacks.
Damn Vulnerable Web Application (DVWA) is a PHP/MySQL web application that is damn vulnerable. Its main goal is to be an aid for security professionals to test their skills and tools in a legal environment, help web developers better understand the processes of securing web applications and to aid both students & teachers to learn about web application security in a controlled class room environment.
Damn Vulnerable Web Services is an insecure web application with multiple vulnerable web service components that can be used to learn real-world web service vulnerabilities.
🆕 NEW — A free cybersecurity knowledge base with practical pentesting, red-team, web, cloud, binary exploitation, and privilege-escalation techniques, contributed by the community.
Hackxor is a web app hacking game where players must locate and exploit vulnerabilities to progress through the story. Think WebGoat but with a plot and a focus on realism&difficulty. Contains XSS, CSRF, SQLi, ReDoS, DOR, command injection, etc.
OWASP SiteGenerator allows the creating of dynamic websites based on XML files and predefined vulnerabilities (some simple, some complex) covering .Net languages and web development architectures (for example, navigation: Html, Javascript, Flash, Java, etc...).
This exercise explains how you can, from a SQL injection, gain access to the administration console, then in the administration console, how you can run commands on the system.
Peruggia is designed as a safe, legal environment to learn about and try common attacks on web applications. Peruggia looks similar to an image gallery but contains several controlled vulnerabilities to practice on.
🆕 NEW — Free online training center for web application security from PortSwigger, with hands-on labs covering topics like XSS, SQL injection, SSRF, authentication, and deserialization.
Stanford SecuriBench / Securibench Micro is a series of small test cases designed to excercise different parts of a static security analyzer. Each test case in Securibench Micro comes with an answer, which simplifies the comparison process.
🆕 NEW — techlogia Lab is a free, browser-based hacking lab teaching Linux server hardening, OWASP Top 10 web security, and GDPR-aware operations. Built for vocational schools and self-learners in the EU. Fully isolated VMs hosted in Germany, no install required, no tracking. Content licensed under CC-BY 4.0.
The ButterFly project is an educational environment intended to give an insight into common web application and PHP vulnerabilities. The environment also includes examples demonstrating how such vulnerabilities are mitigated.
In this training program, you will learn to find and exploit XSS bugs. You'll use this knowledge to confuse and infuriate your adversaries by preventing such bugs from happening in your applications.
🆕 NEW — A free, fun platform for learning modern cryptography by solving challenges and cracking insecure code, from classic ciphers to RSA, AES, and post-quantum crypto.
The ranges offer an excellent platform for you to learn computer network attack (CNA), computer network defense (CND), and digital forensics (DF). You can play any of these roles.
🆕 NEW — A free, community-driven place to download crackmes to practice and improve your reverse-engineering skills, with submissions and a leaderboard.
The goal of this project is to simulate a real-world environment to help people learn about other CPU architectures outside of the x86_64 space. This project will also help people get into discovering new things about hardware.
GOAD is a pentest active directory LAB project. The purpose of this lab is to give pentesters a vulnerable Active directory environment ready to use to practice usual attack techniques.
Labs that cover how an application can be attacked using common web security vulnerabilities, like cross-site scripting vulnerabilities (XSS) and cross-site request forgery (XSRF). Also, you can find labs how to find, fix, and avoid these common vulnerabilities and other bugs that have a security impact, such as denial-of-service, information disclosure, or remote code execution.
HackSys Extreme Vulnerable Driver is intentionally vulnerable Windows driver developed for security enthusiasts to learn and polish their exploitation skills at Kernel level.
🆕 NEW — A set of reverse-engineering and cracking challenges for Android and iOS apps, maintained by the OWASP Mobile Application Security (MAS) project to accompany the MASTG.
🆕 NEW — Beginner-friendly CTF platform with hundreds of free challenges across crypto, forensics, web, reversing, and stego, plus an active learning community.
🆕 NEW — Cyber range built by Echothrust Solutions for running CTFs and trainings on real IT infrastructure, including fully functional smart-city dioramas with 200+ hackable elements.
exploit-exercises.com provides a variety of virtual machines, documentation and challenges that can be used to learn about a variety of computer security issues such as privilege escalation, vulnerability analysis, exploit development, debugging, reverse engineering, and general cyber security issues.
Project GameOver was started with the objective of training and educating newbies about the basics of web security and educate them about the common web attacks and help them understand how they work.
Graceful’s VulnVM is VM web app designed to simulate a simple eCommerce style website which is purposely vulnerable to a number of well know security issues commonly seen in web applications.
Hack The Box is an online platform allowing you to test your penetration testing skills and exchange ideas and methodologies with other members of similar interests. In order to join you should solve an entry-level challenge.
🆕 NEW — Free tier of Hack The Box Academy's structured cybersecurity learning paths and modules covering offensive, defensive, and general security skills.
More than just another hacker wargames site, Hack This Site is a living, breathing community with many active projects in development, with a vast selection of hacking articles and a huge forum where users can discuss hacking, network security, and just about everything.
This course is designed to help web developers on all frameworks identify risks in their own websites before attackers do and it uses this site extensively to demonstrate risks.
Hacking-Lab is an online ethical hacking, computer network and security challenge platform, dedicated to finding and educating cyber security talents. Furthermore, Hacking-Lab is providing the CTF and mission style challenges for the European Cyber Security Challenge with Austria, Germany, Switzerland, UK, Spain, Romania and provides free OWASP TOP 10 online security labs.
The Magical Code Injection Rainbow! MCIR is a framework for building configurable vulnerability testbeds. MCIR is also a collection of configurable vulnerability testbeds.
MysteryTwister C3 lets you solve crypto challenges, starting from the simple Caesar cipher all the way to modern AES, they have challenges for everyone.
picoCTF is a computer security game targeted at middle and high school students. The game consists of a series of challenges centered around a unique storyline where participants must reverse engineer, break, hack, decrypt, or do whatever it takes to solve the challenge.
🆕 NEW — Free hands-on cybersecurity education platform where learners develop and practice core cybersecurity skills, from Linux basics to memory corruption and exploitation.
'pwnable.kr' is a non-commercial wargame site which provides various pwn challenges regarding system exploitation. while playing pwnable.kr, you could learn/improve system hacking skills but that shouldn't be your only purpose.
This network hosts several different wargames, ranging in difficulty. A wargame, in this context, is an environment that simulates software vulnerabilities and allows for the legal execution of exploitation techniques.
TryHackMe is an online platform that teaches Cybersecurity through hands-on virtual labs. Whether you are an expert or beginner, learn through a virtual room structure to understand theoretical and practical security elements.
Focussed on offering computer-related problems. You will find Cryptographic, Crackit, Steganography, Programming, Logic and Math/Science. The difficulty of these challenges varies as well.
🆕 NEW — A gamified platform for cyber defenders to practice security investigations and challenges covering Incident Response, Digital Forensics, Security Operations, and Reverse Engineering.
🆕 NEW — Free platform to upskill and benchmark SOC analysts with real-world cyber-range investigations, blue-team challenges, and structured learning paths.
🆕 NEW — Hands-on blue-team training platform with learning paths, MITRE ATT&CK-mapped courses, and browser-based incident-response challenges for SOC analysts.
🆕 NEW — A deliberately vulnerable AWS infrastructure by Rhino Security Labs for learning cloud-pentesting techniques; spins up vulnerable scenarios you can attack and tear down.
OWASP GoatDroid is a fully functional and self-contained training environment for educating developers and testers on Android security. GoatDroid requires minimal dependencies and is ideal for both Android beginners as well as more advanced users.
LAMPSecurity training is designed to be a series of vulnerable virtual machine images along with complementary documentation designed to teach Linux,apache,PHP,MySQL security.
Morning Catch is a VMware virtual machine, similar to Metasploitable, to demonstrate and teach about targeted client-side attacks and post-exploitation.
Great site with Cybersecurity Awareness Training, Cybersecurity Training for IT Managers, Cybersecurity Training for Cybersecurity Professionals, Cybersecurity Technical Training, NetOps Training, Cyber Law Awareness, and FSO Tools Training available online.
SANS Cyber Aces Online makes available, free and online, selected courses from the professional development curriculum offered by The SANS Institute, the global leader in cyber security training.
UltimateLAMP is a fully functional environment allowing you to easily try and evaluate a number of LAMP stack software products without requiring any specific setup or configuration of these products.
Slavehack 2 is a sequel to the original Slavehack. It's also a virtual hack simulation game but you will find features much closer to today's Cyber reality.
[!TIP]
Every entry on this list is completely free. No trials, no freemium, no paywalls. If a site later becomes paid, it will be removed from the list.
If you found this list useful, please consider starring the repository and sharing it with others who might benefit. It helps the project grow and reach more people who want to learn security safely.
Joe Shenouda — "Our work is no longer to secure computers alone, it's now about securing society."
Joe Shenouda is a seasoned cybersecurity expert with experience in engineering, consulting, and research. He has worked with leading companies like Verizon and Accenture, specializing in operational cybersecurity. Joe is passionate about mentoring and training the next generation of cybersecurity specialists, using industry standards like ISO, NIST, and CIS Controls to guide organizations in adopting best practices.
Accolades:
🏆 Named one of the 50 most talented young leaders in the Netherlands by MT Magazine
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