Wednesday, October 28, 2026

Mapping a free hands-on hacking curriculum with TryHackMe-Roadmap

Mapping a free hands-on hacking curriculum with TryHackMe-Roadmap

Hunterdii/TryHackMe-Roadmap curates 500+ free TryHackMe rooms into a topic-ordered study path for authorized training in labs, CTF practice, and defensive skill-building.

ToolHunterdii/TryHackMe-Roadmap — curated index of 502 free TryHackMe practice rooms organized by security topic
CategoryEducational resource / curated learning path
Primary UseStructured self-study of Linux, Windows, Active Directory, web testing, forensics, and CTF skills in sandboxed TryHackMe labs
Safe UseAll linked rooms run on TryHackMe's isolated, authorized training infrastructure; the resource is purely educational and targets no real systems
Telemetry NoteA Markdown-only directory that generates no network traffic itself; all activity occurs inside TryHackMe's sanctioned lab environments

Not every valuable entry on GitHub is an executable binary or a Python framework. Hunterdii/TryHackMe-Roadmap is a living curriculum: a single, obsessively organized README.md that indexes 502 free rooms on the TryHackMe training platform, sorted into 27 topical categories with completion checkboxes maintained by the repository owner. At roughly 550 stars and released under a CC0-1.0 license, it has become a de facto study syllabus for people entering offensive and defensive security who want a deliberate path rather than aimless room-hopping. For a publication that usually dissects scanners and frameworks, it is worth covering precisely because onboarding and structured practice are the substrate every operator eventually stands on.

The structure of the repository is its whole product. The table of contents is a category-by-category breakdown — 21 introductory rooms, 4 on Linux Fundamentals, 3 on Windows Fundamentals, then progressively specialized tracks: 10 Reconnaissance, 7 Scripting, 7 Networking, and 18 Tooling rooms. From there it branches into defensive and offensive depth: 17 Forensics, 8 Malware Analysis, 9 Reverse Engineering, 13 Privilege Escalation, 8 Active Directory, 4 PCAP Analysis, and 4 Buffer Overflow rooms. The largest blocks are the CTF tiers — 98 easy, 99 medium, 42 hard, and a single insane room — which together make up over half the catalog and function as the capstone practice volume.

What distinguishes this list from a bare link dump is the owner's progress column. Each category tracks rooms completed by the maintainer, with 50 of 502 checked off at the time of writing, and every individual room entry carries a Markdown checkbox. That transforms the document from reference material into a trackable training plan: a learner forks the repository, ticks rooms as they finish them, and inherits the same sequencing the author is working through. It is a lightweight, git-native implementation of what commercial bootcamps sell as structured learning paths, at an explicit cost of zero — every indexed room is free-to-access on TryHackMe.

The category ordering itself encodes a defensible pedagogy. The path begins with platform mechanics (OpenVPN connectivity, the tutorial room, hosted hypervisors), moves through operating-system fundamentals on both Linux and Windows, then layers on concrete tradecraft — enumeration, brute-force concepts, Burp Suite workflows (the repo is tagged with burpsuite among its topics), and cryptography. Only after that foundation does it reach the genuinely advanced material: Active Directory attack rooms, buffer overflow exploit development, steganography, and Wi-Fi security exercises. That mirrors how professional training programs are sequenced and gives junior analysts a sanity check against skipping straight to the shiny CTF rooms.

The defensive side of the catalog deserves as much attention as the offensive tracks. The introductory section includes rooms on threat hunting (Threat Hunting: Introduction, Threat Hunting: Foothold), log fundamentals (Intro to Logs), threat emulation, the SDLC, and security engineering — a Blue Team on-ramp embedded in the same document. Combined with 17 forensics rooms, 4 PCAP analysis rooms, and 8 malware analysis rooms, the repository works as a defender's syllabus too. For SOC leads and team mentors, it is a ready-made answer to the recurring question of what a new hire should work through in their first months, all inside TryHackMe's isolated, authorized lab environments where nothing touches production infrastructure.

Repository hygiene is better than the emoji-laden banner might suggest. The contribution workflow is documented concretely: fork the project, add rooms to the relevant section of README.md, number the new entries so per-category counts stay accurate, and open a pull request. Guidelines require that submitted links be free-to-access, include a name and brief description, and not duplicate existing entries. The topic list — cyber-forensics, reverse-engineering, web-penetration-testing, container-security, and others — signals an intent to keep expanding into cloud security, OSINT, and exploit development, areas the author explicitly flags as future additions in a suggestions section.

The README also cross-references Dark-Moon, a separate GPL-3.0 autonomous penetration-testing platform by another author, described as useful for practicing against the legal rooms and labs in the list. Treated as untrusted third-party context, that pointer is best read as a community recommendation rather than an endorsement, and professionals evaluating it should perform their own review of any automation before pointing it at anything. It does illustrate the ecosystem effect, though: curated curricula and practice tooling grow around each other, and a 500-room index becomes a natural directory for adjacent open-source projects seeking an audience of learners.

There are honest caveats to note. As a pure Markdown resource, the project has no code, no releases, and no versioning beyond commit history — link rot is the primary failure mode whenever TryHackMe retires or re-prices a room, which is exactly why the maintainer's last-commit badge and PR-driven upkeep matter more here than in a typical tool repository. The completion counts are one person's progress, not a quality rating, and the CTF sections are voluminous enough that learners still need to exercise judgment about what to prioritize for their actual role. The CC0-1.0 licensing, however, means teams can freely fork, prune, and customize the checklist into internal onboarding material without attribution concerns.

For authorized professionals, the operational value is straightforward: junior penetration testers get a graded ramp from fundamentals to Active Directory and exploit-development practice; blue teamers get a forensics-and-detection track; and instructors get a zero-cost syllabus they can assign directly. Everything the repository links to runs inside TryHackMe's sanctioned training infrastructure, so the entire resource is inherently educational and documentary in character — a rare case where the analysis surface is the curriculum itself, and the main skill it builds is the disciplined habit of finishing what you start, 502 checkboxes at a time.

Official project repository for Hunterdii/TryHackMe-Roadmap.
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Educational analysis for authorized security professionals. Use only in controlled, authorized environments.

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