Offensive Tooling Cheatsheets: An Infosec Survival Guide Resource

Skip to the cheatsheets!

How and Why This Was Made

The Infosec Survival Guide continues to be an experiment. The first edition resulted in more of an explanation of our services and how they were helpful. The second edition—now known as the “Yellow Book”—was our attempt to create something with more direct value for readers. That direction continued with the “Green Book,” which covered a range of varying topics to help infosec professionals get started, learn more, and find reliable jumping-off points into new areas. It wasn’t meant to be exhaustive, but to offer foundational knowledge and point toward helpful resources.

As always, the goal of the Guide is rooted in a collaboration between BHIS and YOU, our amazing, active community. The cheatsheets you’ll find throughout this resource were written largely by volunteers who generously offered their time and knowledge to help us provide free, useful resources to others in the field.

When we started the “Offensive Tooling Cheatsheet Edition,” the plan was to produce another fully published, printed book. It was a new kind of experiment for the Content & Community team. Up to that point, we hadn’t spent much time in the cheatsheet space; we were far more comfortable with articles and long-form written content. Cheatsheets were a different beast entirely. They brought new challenges. Where grammatical edits and sentence restructuring all fell into our ballpark, lines of code and the functions of digital tools were a bit beyond us. We were constantly asking: “Is this good?” “Is this accurate?” “Did this code block transfer correctly?” “Is that floating period a typo?” (It wasn’t .)

It’s worth noting: we’re the ‘creativity’ department. While some on the team have a working knowledge of the more technical aspects, many of us aren’t so hands-on in cybersecurity. So for this edition, we leaned on our internal Security Analysts more than ever. Every cheatsheet went through careful technical peer review to ensure we were publishing accurate, high-quality content. While we usually focus on grammar, tone, and structure, this time we were also double- and triple-checking syntax, command formatting, and how things held up in design.

As the project evolved, we realized this version wasn’t destined to be a printed book. We needed the flexibility to keep updating as tools and technologies shift (as we all know they rapidly do). A digital format made more sense, giving folks the ability to freely access, print, and use each cheatsheet as needed.

So this edition became something different: An Infosec Survival Guide Resource released as blog posts, with fully designed, printer-friendly PDF cheatsheets.

The Cheatsheets

Here, you’ll find a fully designed, printer-friendly compiled PDF of all the cheatsheets:

• FULL VERSION PDF

If you prefer an online blog-version, or want individual cheatsheet PDFs, access them here:

• Burp Suite
• DNS Triage
• Eyewitness
• GraphRunner
• Hashcat
• Impacket
• Netcat (nc)
• Nmap
• Wireshark

Thank you for sticking with us. Thank you for choosing to help others. Thank you for allowing us to build cool stuff like this. We couldn’t do this without you.

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