Use whatever gets the job done. I use Windows 7 & 10 and Kali. I know a lot of people that use Arch Linux too. Kali being the most popular is usually laughed at by hardened souls but whatever gets the job done.

OSWP is a course by Offensive Security dealing with wireless hacking. Vivek is a well respected gent in the pen testing world. A very knowledgeable man indeed. I bought Shellcoding for Linux 32 bit systems and learned a lot from it. As long as you have a Pineapple AP sitting next to your laptop, eve...

Hopefully you've got backups. Reinstall windows as your operating system is FUBAR.

Official class based Cisco training is some of the best you can get. However, if learning from the official Cisco books, it's going to be very droll and boring. There's a lot you can do to learn before you take the Cisco route though. Just remember that networking isn't just about Cisco. The OSI mod...

If you are going in at CCENT level then it will provide you with the basics. There's another lower level called IT Essentials. An online training platform I did in college when I did my HNC in computing. I'd stay away from the Cisco official books as they as dull as anything. I got the CCNA in 60 da...

One of the most important things is enumeration. You can't hack anything until you know what it is you are hacking, and in order to do that you need to find out everything about your target. Open Source Intelligent Techniques is a great book for web recon. However, I'd stick to learning how to lever...

Good good. Doing my OSCP just now. Well the Labs/PWK part. Tough son of a gun I tell ya

Take a piece of hardware or software and make it do something it wasn't designed to do. That's hacking.

Scrap my advice above. Get yourself on to Vulnhub.com and download some of the vulnerable VM capture the Flag challenge servers and run them locally on your machine. Do these things on everything you test. Detect the IP on your home network ifconfig on your own Linux box and detect the network in us...

To be honest. I've changed a hell of a lot since I created this post. I do bug bounties, and I'm training in Pen Testing using VM's and I'm doing OSCP so now I don't really need to have a VPN. I did flutter with the idea of keeping anon online but not now.