If you're in cybersecurity — whether you're a penetration tester, CTF player, bug bounty hunter, or blue teamer — you know HackTricks. The living book by Carlos Polop is arguably the most exhaustive, practical, and battle-tested collection of hacking tricks on the internet.
But with thousands of pages, where do you focus? We’ve distilled 179 of the absolute best, most actionable tricks from HackTricks into this solid post.
Note: These are not just random commands. Each one has a specific use case: privilege escalation, enumeration, bypass, or persistence.
Windows is complex, but the HackTricks 179 best narrows down AD enumeration to a handful of bloodhound-queries and PowerView commands.
As infrastructure shifts to containers, the "179 best" has adapted.
Subdomain enumeration (wordlist + brute)
Subdomain takeover check
DNS zone transfer attempt
DNS brute-force
Reverse IP lookup / virtual host discovery
Port scanning (fast then full)
Service fingerprinting
Web crawling & content discovery
Fuzzing parameters and endpoints
Credential and secret harvesting from public repos
WHOIS and contact harvesting
OSINT on personnel (profiles, emails)
Staff email permutation generation
Shodan / Censys infrastructure search
Cloud resource discovery (AWS/GCP/Azure)
API enumeration & swagger discovery
Sitemap and robots.txt analysis
Certificate transparency monitoring
Rate-limited endpoint fingerprinting