Josh Hutcheson

Last updated: September 2026. Written by Josh Hutcheson, OnlineCourseing editor. See our review methodology. THE SHORT ANSWER Three hat colors have stable meanings. The rest are folklore. White, black and gray hat are used consistently across the industry. Red, blue and green hat are not: three of the sites currently ranking for this question define

Last updated: September 2026. Written by Josh Hutcheson, OnlineCourseing editor. See our review methodology. HOW TO USE THIS GLOSSARY These 78 terms are grouped by where they sit in an attack, not alphabetically, because that is how practitioners actually use them, and an A–Z list teaches you nothing about how the pieces connect. Learning for

Last updated: September 2026. Written by Josh Hutcheson, OnlineCourseing editor. See our review methodology. QUICK VERDICT Bottom line: For almost everyone getting into hacking or penetration testing, Kali Linux is the right place to start: it is free, actively maintained, and ships with 600+ tools out of the box. Parrot Security OS is the best

Last updated: May 2026. Written by Josh Hutcheson, OnlineCourseing editor. See our review methodology. CompTIA Network+ validates the core networking skills that sit underneath almost every IT and security role, and it’s a natural pairing with Security+. The current exam is N10-009 (N10-008 is retiring and N10-007 is retired), so step one is making sure

Last updated: August 2026. Written by Josh Hutcheson, OnlineCourseing editor. Every tool below was checked against Kali’s official package listing at kali.org/tools before publication. QUICK VERDICT Bottom line: Kali ships with several hundred tools, but you do not need to learn several hundred tools. Kali’s own maintainers publish a top-10 shortlist — Nmap, Metasploit, Burp