Quarterly Community Updates: Student Discounts, OffSec Live, Partner Program, & Much More!

A lot has been going on over the last quarter at OffSec, and it’s easy to miss some important items with all the activity. To help make things easier to track, we’re excited to now provide quarterly wrap-ups of things that happened in the world of OffSec!

In these posts we will discuss launches, events, and updates that occurred last quarter, sneak peeks of what’s coming up next quarter, and how you can get involved. All of this activity directly relates to our vision of ongoing workforce development. This vision has included changes to our content, the packaging of our content in a library as opposed to the traditional course structure, the addition of badges and digital certificates, as well as our increased transparency with efforts like our ongoing weekly office hours. 

Student Discounts

As part of the cybersecurity community, we listen to our students’ feedback! Because of this feedback, we have introduced two new discount programs for Learn One. These are excellent programs for those looking to get started in the cyber security field or develop skills in advanced-level courses. 

• Aspire program offers up to 20% off for current certificate holders
• Achieve program provides up to 10% discount for university students. 

The Learn Fundamentals subscription offers unlimited access to 100-level content to help new students build a strong, foundational understanding of cybersecurity-adjacent basics. These new programs are designed to allow students to have easier access to our professional training and reward long-term customers. Take advantage of our discounts today!

Online Events

The Offsec Community provides information and updates in various formats, such as discussions, podcasts, live events, etc.

Every Friday at 1 p.m. ET, panelists host the Office Hour on the Discord server. This is a chance for you to ask us questions you might have about a current course or career opportunity, and even learn how we determine what topics to cover in our training. 

You can also tune in for live box walkthroughs on Twitch with S1REN as she navigates a PG Play or VulnHub target every Friday at 5 p.m. ET. The community can’t thank S1REN enough for her guidance, demonstrating the thought process involved when working through challenging systems. 

Some of the topics we discussed in our webinars and podcast episodes include:

– How to Write Effective Entry-Level Cybersecurity Job Descriptions
– Your Kali Linux Experience
– How the OSCP Helps Career Growth
– How Hackers Think

OffSec Live: PEN-200

OffSec Live: PEN-200 is a streaming offering that facilitates learning, improves engagement, and ultimately increases Offensive Security Certified Professional (OSCP) certification preparedness and achievement for students enrolled in PEN-200. 

This provides PEN-200 students with twice-a-week instructional streams and a weekly office hour which builds on the PEN-200 curriculum to prepare students for the OSCP exam. OffSec Live is an experimental offering that is actively changing based on student feedback as we optimize the OSCP journey for students. If you are a PEN-200 student and not taking advantage of this resource you need to check it out! 

Sessions stream every Wednesday and Friday at 12 p.m. ET on Twitch. Additionally, we host Office Hours on Mondays at 12 p.m. ET for PEN-200 students that are attending OffSec Live. This is an opportunity to get answers to your questions about PEN-200. To join our events, check the portal for details and start times in your local time zone.

OSCP Exam Resources

We recently added a new Restricted Exam video that students can watch to help them prepare and better understand exam rules and guidelines.  The video answers the most common questions about the OSCP exam restrictions. For more info, please see OSCP Exam Guide.

Conferences

The OffSec team has attended and/or sponsored the following conferences over the last quarter: 

• NICE Cyber Conference in Atlanta, GA
• Special Operations Forces Industry Conference, SOFIC 2022 
• ATSD CERTS in Augusta, GA
• TechNet Cyber in Baltimore, MD
• TechNet Indo-Pacific in Hawaii
• WEST in San, Diego
• Future Directions Summit (NCyTE), Virginia, US 
• BSides Nairobi Cyber Challenge (CTF)
• BarCode (Podcast)
• XCION 9th Annual Virtual Conference (Indonesia)
• AISA CyberCon Canberra (Australia)
• SEETF (CTF)
• Temasek Polytechnic YCEP Event (Singapore)
• STANDCON (Singapore)
• Div0 June Meetup (Singapore)

At the Standcon webinar, our cybersecurity expert, TJNull, spoke about the importance of manual pentesting. At the National Child Protection Task Force (NCPTF) annual conference in Arkansas, TJNull explained how law enforcement can use Kali Linux in their operations for finding missing people.

Kali Linux

May 2022 saw the release of Kali Linux 2022.2, which included desktop updates for GNOME 42 and KDE Plasma users and an alternative layout for ARM devices designed for smaller screens. Using Kali in VirtualBox? You should get a better ‘out of the box’ experience, with shared folders now working, just like that.

Continuing forward with last year’s April Fools’ Day joke,  Kali released: “Hollywood mode”. If this doesn’t give you the 80’s hacking vibe, nothing will!

And last but by no means least, in case you missed it, Kali Unkaputtba. This brings virtual machine snapshots to bare metal. Less breaking, more hacking.
There are also a bunch of other little improvements and tweaks, as well as the normal tool updates as well. Happy upgrading!

Content and Labs

There are quite a few releases we had this last quarter into the OffSec Training Library. We’re thrilled to continue to increase the value of the library for subscribers. Updates include:

• Fundamental Topics and PEN-100 Assessment

• • We’ve released 23 Fundamental Topics in the Offsec Training Library year to date, with more to come. These Topics range from Bash and Python Scripting, to Working with Shells, and Web Session Management.
  • We’ve also released OffSec’s first assessment. The PEN-100 assessment is designed as a capstone to the PEN-100 Topics, and helps students understand if they’ve truly grasped the material. Students that earn our PEN-100 level badge can feel confident in choosing PEN-200 as the next-step in their journey. Students can earn the PEN-100 badge for completing the assessment as well as 80% of exercises for each PEN-100 Topic in the OffSec Training Library.

• PWK Topic Exercises
  • Six months ago we released Topic Exercises for PEN-200: a novel approach to hands-on, interactive learning for our PWK students. Since then Topic Exercises have received tremendous acclaim. With over 125 unique exercises, so far students have submitted over 113,472 correct answers in the OffSec Platform.
    

• EXP-312 and OSMR
  • We launched the Offensive Security macOS Researcher (OSMR) certification in February, and added more Topics to the macOS Control Bypasses course.
    • Injection Code intro Electron Applications create and inject code into the popular Electron Applications. 
    • A Mount(ain) of Bugs covers how we can use the ‘mount’ operation as an attack vector and covers three case studies.
      

• WEB-200 and OSWA Exam
  • We’ve released three WEB-200 Topics, as well as five WEB-200 challenges.
  • We’ve released the Offensive Security Web Assessor (OSWA) exam and have already had students take the exam and achieve the certification. 

• SOC-200 Progress and Challenge Labs
  • We’ve released nine SOC-200 Topics, as well as two SOC-200 challenges. Exam development for the Offensive Security Defensive Analyst is well underway.

Thanks to the content team, students can easily find modules based on job roles and difficulty levels in the newly updated OffSec Training Library. 

100th PG Practice Machine

Celebrate the release of the 100th PG-Practice Machine! The PG-Practice lab is an environment where students are able to practice different techniques in a safe and private environment against vulnerable targets.

Do you have a concept idea for the next vulnerable machine? Click here to submit your scripts, work with us to develop the next machine, and get paid.

Partner with Offsec

We launched the OffSec Global Partner Program, which focuses on enabling, empowering, and supporting partners through instructor training and resources, including an instructor onboarding process, knowledge transfer of OffSec’s best practices, and access to OffSec instructor materials. This also allows partners access to sales and marketing support, special partner pricing, licensing models, and more. 

In this program there are three types of partners:

• Learning partners, who provide live, authorized instructor-led courses in boot camp or continuing education settings for those looking to enter into, or advance in, cybersecurity. 
• Education partners, who teach and provide OffSec materials in a college or university to students who intend on entering the infosec field following graduation. 
• Channel partners, including value-added and government resellers that offer self-paced online OffSec training courses.

Secure Digital Certificates

Since April 2022, we have evolved from issuing paper certifications and physical cards to digitalized certificates and badges for all courses except OSCE3. We also want to recognize student achievements in the PEN-100 learning path with digital badges to show their competency and accomplishments. Digital certificates and badges offer more benefits than their paper counterparts, such as immediate access, quick send to multiple employers, and social sharing. Digital certificates and badges are blockchain secure and can be verified on our new platform, Accredible. This platform allows us to produce environmentally friendly digital certificates and badges as we save on paper and packaging. Students are given the option to print a high-resolution certificate or badge at a local/online print shop or a home printer in a paper format as they prepare for their desired career

Black Hat

Check back for more updates next quarter, and look out for OffSec at the Black Hat conference in Las Vegas in August.  Our staff will teach Penetration Testing with Kali Linux (PWK) and Advanced Windows Exploitation (AWE). Come talk to our team at booth (2608) and learn more about what OffSec has to offer. 

We have some exciting news about the growth of the Exploit Database with another 123 entries being added. So stay tuned! Don’t forget to check out our Discord for Announcements and Community!