A curated Markdown knowledge base that organizes penetration testing, cloud, mobile, and defensive security references into a navigable kill-chain structure for authorized professionals.
| Tool | Ilias1988/Hacking-Cheatsheets — curated collection of penetration testing cheatsheets and defensive security quick references |
| Category | Security knowledge base / reference documentation |
| Primary Use | Rapid syntax and methodology lookup during authorized assessments, CTF practice, and SOC work |
| Safe Use | Reference material for authorized penetration tests, lab environments, CTF platforms, and defensive security training |
| Telemetry Note | Pure documentation repository with no runtime component; executing any referenced tools against systems generates the telemetry of those tools themselves |
Hacking-Cheatsheets from Ilias1988 is not a tool in the executable sense but rather a structured knowledge base — a repository of Markdown documents that consolidates command syntax, methodology, and best-practice notes for a wide swath of the offensive and defensive security landscape. With 567 stars and a topic set spanning cheatsheet, penetration-testing, red-team, and ethical-hacking, it has clearly found an audience among practitioners who want a single bookmarkable place for reference material instead of dozens of scattered notes. What distinguishes it from the average dump of copied commands is its organizational discipline: content is arranged into named directories mirroring both the attack lifecycle and specific technology domains.
The backbone of the repository is its Attack-Methodology directory, which the README explicitly maps to the MITRE ATT&CK framework. Seven phase guides cover Initial Access, Enumeration, Privilege Escalation, Lateral Movement, Persistence, Defense Evasion, and Actions on Objectives, each as a standalone Markdown file. This kill-chain framing is useful for authorized engagements because it gives assessors a checklist-shaped mental model for coverage: when a report needs to justify which phases were tested and which were out of scope, having reference material organized by phase makes gap analysis considerably easier than tool-centric organization.
Perhaps the most notable design decision is that the collection is not red-team only. A full Blue-Team section provides guides for Incident Response, Log Analysis including Windows and Linux Event IDs, SIEM Detection with Splunk and ELK query examples, Threat Hunting, Hardening checklists, and rule authoring for both Sigma and YARA. For defenders, this dual coverage is valuable in a specific way: purple-team exercises depend on both sides speaking the same vocabulary, and a repository that documents attack technique and corresponding detection logic in one place reduces the translation friction that often plagues those exercises.
The cloud section addresses the three major providers with dedicated guides: AWS-Pentesting.md covering S3, IAM, Lambda, EC2, and IMDS; Azure-Pentesting.md spanning Azure AD, Blob Storage, VMs, and Key Vault; and GCP-Pentesting.md addressing GCS, IAM, Compute, and Cloud Functions. The inclusion of IMDS in the AWS guide is a good signal of currency, since metadata-service abuse remains one of the most common cloud misconfiguration findings in real authorized assessments. Grouping provider-specific guidance this way also helps testers who cross between environments avoid the classic mistake of assuming AWS habits transfer cleanly to Azure RBAC.
Modern infrastructure is represented in the Container-Security directory, with separate guides for Docker and Kubernetes covering topics like container escape, image analysis, RBAC bypass, pod escape, and secrets extraction. The Mobile-Security section parallels this with Android material on APK analysis, Frida, and root-detection bypass, and iOS material on IPA analysis, Objection, and keychain inspection. These are domains where command syntax changes quickly between tool versions, which is precisely the scenario where a maintained cheatsheet earns its keep compared to stale blog posts.
The tool-specific cheatsheet core reads like a who's-who of standard assessment tooling. Exploitation framework references include Metasploit, Meterpreter, Mimikatz, PowerShell, and Linux-Commands. Reconnaissance and scanning are covered through Nmap, Gobuster, and Nikto; web testing through SQLMap, Burp Suite, and OWASP ZAP; password auditing through Hydra, John The Ripper, and Hashcat; and network analysis through Wireshark and tcpdump. Each cheatsheet, per the README, pairs command syntax with practical examples, use-case scenarios, quick reference tables, and tips contributed from experienced testers.
The bug bounty section is unusually deep compared to the rest of the repository, reflecting where community energy currently sits. Alongside a starred methodology guide, it documents the ProjectDiscovery ecosystem — Nuclei, httpx, Subfinder, and Katana — plus ffuf, Amass, GAU for archived URL collection, Arjun for hidden parameter discovery, and Dalfox for XSS detection. This grouping effectively describes a repeatable recon-to-report pipeline that many bounty hunters run, and the cheatsheet format lets a practitioner check a forgotten flag without breaking flow mid-engagement.
Several supporting sections round out the collection. An OSINT directory covers people search, email intelligence including breach checking, social media and username enumeration, WHOIS and DNS reconnaissance, and image analysis with reverse search and EXIF metadata. A CTF section targets the training-laboratory crowd with guides for HackTheBox, TryHackMe, and PicoCTF across web, crypto, reverse engineering with Ghidra and GDB, forensics, and pwn categories. An IoT-Hacking directory covers firmware analysis with Binwalk and hardware interfaces like UART, JTAG, SPI, and I2C. There is even a social engineering section discussing tooling such as GoPhish, which readers should note exists strictly for authorized security-awareness simulation contexts.
A practical addition that many similar repositories omit is the Reporting directory, which supplies templates for a full penetration test report, a HackerOne or Bugcrowd submission, and an executive summary aimed at C-level readers. Reporting is where authorized assessments actually deliver value, and the fact that the repository treats it as a first-class section — rather than an afterthought — suggests the author understands the full engagement lifecycle. For junior testers especially, a well-structured report template is often the difference between findings that get remediated and findings that get ignored.
Acquisition is trivial since this is documentation: a git clone https://github.com/Ilias1988/Hacking-Cheatsheets gives you the full tree for offline reference during lab work or isolated assessment networks. The repository also ships an Italian-language mirror at README.it.md, and GitHub reports the license as NOASSERTION despite an MIT badge in the README — a minor discrepancy worth noting before redistributing or adapting the content commercially. Contributors are welcomed via a dedicated section, which matters for a reference work whose value decays as tool flags and APIs drift.
From a defensive perspective, this repository is worth reading even if you never touch an offensive tool. The Blue-Team guides document which Event IDs matter, what good Sigma and YARA rules look like, and how to structure hunts — and the red-team sections tell you exactly which techniques your detections should be built against. Treat it as a curriculum map: if your monitoring cannot articulate coverage for the phases in Attack-Methodology, that gap is your next engineering priority, all in service of authorized, well-documented security work.
Ilias1988/Hacking-Cheatsheets.Educational analysis for authorized security professionals. Use only in controlled, authorized environments.
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