Hack to Learn

One of the common questions I keep getting is, "How do I learn to hack". My usual answer is to grow up and get a life.

However, in case anyone is really interested in learning offensive security, or in other words would like to "hack to learn" from the experience, here is what I can recommend:

• Backtrack:  The must have distro, with all the tools required. The new version is called Kali
• The team which created Backtrack also runs a few certification programs. All of these are paid, but extremely helpful
• This same group also has one free training program
• To practice, and to get some experience around exploitation, here a few helpful and hack-able targets
• McAfee's Hackme - A web based exploitable application. Here is a good tutorial with Hackme
• WebGoat is a J2EE web app from OWASP, designed to teach web application security lessons