Ethical hacking has turned mainstream by way of bug bounty programs. Platforms such as hackerone.com and bugcrowd.com have allowed hackers to come out of the shadows and earn an honest living for the skillsets that they have.

Although times have changed, and many hackers have turned from blackhats into whitehats, the stigma around hackers still persists.

Big tech, and bug bounty programs have been known to take advantage of ethical hackers - denying them a bounty for their confirmed security vulnerability, and patching the vulnerability out of band.

Our goal is to raise awareness about these events, and ultimately form a hackers union.

HackTree started an initiative to teach anyone that wanted to learn how to hack, and August 5th, 2021 we held our first class.

We started with basic Web2 reconnaissance, google dorking, setting up your hacking environment and then moved on to mobile device recon and exploitation.

The desire to learn, and the community support was absolutely amazing. We had almost 2000 students enrolled in our classes, and more people were finding out about us everyday. We wanted to create a platform that allowed anyone interested in hacking and information security to come and learn no matter what your level of experience.

We never charged for classes because we feel like this information should be free. Our volunteer instructors were amazing and support for other students creates a great learning environment.

We are actively working to have create a larger and safer environment for anyone interested to come and learn. As soon as we have completed all of the logistics there will be a public announcement and area to enroll.

These areas of expertise in information security are in such critical demand, and they are not taught in Universities, or Colleges around the world.

Malware spread through mobile devices and IOT devices is more prevalent now than ever. iPhones, and Android can be infected with malicious software or hardware and it may never be detected.

Not all researchers are equal. Just as doctors have specialties, so do security researchers. Our aim is to teach specialized mobile security, IOT, and cryptosec research classes, and provide resources for all that are interested in these niche fields within information security.

Mobile devices are a big portal into the crypto currency world. Identifying security vulnerabilities within the mobile device hardware, firmware, and software applications we use daily is something that is often disregarded.

By helping shift the mindset of the researcher from thinking outside and around the box, to removing the box completely; we feel that it is with this mindset that complex research can be simplified and the most critical vulnerabilities can be discovered.