Once upon a time, pentesting cheatsheets were the thing.
My personal holy grail was Pentestmonkey’s blog with a dedicated cheatsheet as a curated list of commands every aspiring pentester kept close at hand. It felt like discovering a secret spellbook: practical, concise, hand-crafted by experience. Occasionally, I still open the blog and stare at the last post: 20th December 2011. Maybe he’ll come back one time.
Fast forward to 2025, and those early cheatsheets feel almost prehistoric.
Today, incredible community projects like HackTricks and PayloadAllTheThings have swallowed the old ecosystem whole. They’re living organisms being constantly updated, deeply detailed, and maintained by entire communities rather than individual enthusiasts. Fantastic work by the community.
But, despite all the progress, I still believe something meaningful was built in the act of making your own cheatsheet.
For me, it lived in a chaotic CherryTree file, full of typos, half-baked notes, strange indentation choices, and the occasional “TODO” that never got finished. And yet, assembling that messy collection was a learning process in itself. Every command I saved meant: I understood something today.
So, since there’s no real point in publishing my ancient cheatsheet considering the phenomenal alternatives already out there. I’ll leave just this:
A memory of the very first line I typed when I did my OSCP exam and the moment it represented:
A blank terminal, a blinking cursor, and the feeling of stepping into a 24-hour exam full of pain, suffering, regret and frustration…because it is fun.
That was the beginning. And maybe that’s what these old cheatsheets were really about: not the commands, but the journey they captured.
## Scanning first host with nmap
sudo nmap -sS -p- --min-rate 10000 --max-retries 0 -oN allPortsSYN $IP