What is hacktricks?

HackTricks is a large, community-maintained cybersecurity knowledge base that documents hacking techniques, penetration testing methods, and security research findings. It is written in a wiki-style format and covers topics gathered from real-world security assessments, research, and CTF competitions. The README is primarily a list of corporate sponsors who fund the project, alongside brief descriptions of their services, including penetration testing firms, bug bounty platforms, AI security training providers, and security tooling companies. The sponsors include STM Cyber, Intigriti, HackenProof, and others, all of which offer security-related services. This sponsor section takes up most of the README. To run a local copy of HackTricks, you clone the repository and start a Docker container that builds the content using mdBook, a tool for creating websites from Markdown files. The site supports multiple languages, including English, German, Spanish, French, Japanese, Chinese, and others. Each language is available on a separate branch. Once the Docker container finishes building, the site is available at http://localhost:3337, typically within a few minutes. The content itself, which is the main value of the project, is not described in detail in the README beyond the project description: it contains techniques and tricks the author learned from CTF competitions and real security engagements. The full book covers topics such as network pentesting, web application attacks, privilege escalation, mobile security, reverse engineering, and cloud security, though these are documented in the wiki pages rather than the README. The project accepts community contributions and is available in over a dozen languages maintained as separate git branches.