Half a Million Users Are Learning Cyber Security on TryHackMe

TryHackMe now has 500,000 aspiring cyber practitioners increasing their technical skills within cyber security. It was only six months ago that we hit 250,000 registered users. Since then, we've been very grateful that 42,000 new people have chosen to come to TryHackMe every month. 500,000 registered users is a significant milestone for us, and we want to talk a little more about what we've done to get to this stage and what our plans are for the future.

Core Values & Why we do what we do

Any decision at TryHackMe, whether its related to running events, creating content or developing new features, is guided by our 4 main values:  

• Universally Accessible - There are various barriers to learning cyber security, including high cost, fragmented quality of learning material and experience and more. TryHackMe aims to remove as many of these barriers as possible, including utilising an affordable subscription cost ($10/user/month) and structured learning paths aligned to careers. Anyone at any skill level can sign up and start learning how to become an ethical hacker, penetration tester or cyber security analyst.
• Innovative - Learning security is too theory-oriented, with little opportunity to get hands-on, practical experience. TryHackMe gives students interactive exercises, which allows them to put their knowledge into practice through real-world scenarios. Everything you learn at TryHackMe will be directly applicable to what you do in the real world, ranging from applying skills to job roles, utilising knowledge from TryHackMe in interviews and more.
• Sparking Curiosity - We want students to be excited and curious; hacking is essentially manipulating a program or service to your will and can only be done when you are curious enough to understand how an application works. The structure and nature of our training material help students explore this curiosity and guide them through the exciting world of computer security.
• Community Driven - The community is the heart of the platform. TryHackMe was built to help people, and the only way to ensure that we're meeting our community's needs is by constantly speaking to them and taking any actions with their best interest at heart.

We're incredibly thankful to everyone who has signed up and supported the platform. It's because of you that we've been able to develop TryHackMe!

The Future of Learning on TryHackMe

Our mission is to make cyber security training as engaging, real-world and beginner-friendly as possible, and we're just at the beginning of this exciting journey.

In the past, we've focused heavily on teaching students offensive security concepts, with the criteria that they would need some technical pre-requisite knowledge. We're currently working on three main areas:

• Cyber Fundamentals Learning Path - to teach students all the core technical pre-requisites to start learning cyber security
• Red Team Learning Path - to teach students how to attack Windows Active Directory and enterprise networks
• Defensive Security Learning Path - to further teach students blue team concepts, including malware analysis, threat emulation and more

We want all our labs to simulate real-world scenarios, and one way that we've achieved this is by creating networks. Recently we released a free network called Wreath (yes you read that right, access machines and learn for FREE), which teaches network pivoting and anti-virus evasion. We're currently working on releasing Holo, a network that teaches users how to compromise different Windows Active Directory network aspects.

We also have shorter (bite-sized) practical exercises, from configuring a web-based network to walking through hacking BookFace (a fake social media platform simulating a real-world attack). We include these types of mini interactive exercises into every lesson, so you'll always put theory into practice.

The future is bright! Our roadmap for this year includes new learning paths and security challenges, better support for career development, and we will be trialling new features that make learning fun and more collaborative.

What we've been up to

We've had many things happening behind the scenes in the past year, including significant engineering changes to scale TryHackMe and in-house content development to bring you the best training material. We've been building out a team of really talented individuals to do all this:

• a dedicated content engineering team to bring you the best training content
• a quality assurance engineer to make sure our lessons are of the highest quality
• software engineers to help us scale and build out the platform
• a customer success manager to help with our classroom program for School/College/University/corporate clients teaching security using TryHackMe

Other notable individuals who've helped TryHackMe operate is our support engineer and community manager.

TryHackMe is the fastest growing, community-first cyber training company, and we want to help students learn (and upskill) in cyber security to be career-ready. Our journey has only just begun, and we're very excited about what we have planned.

Thanks again to everyone who has shared, recommended or signed up to TryHackMe!

"User sign ups are not TryHackMe's main metric. What matters to us is retention, user experience and weekly active users." - Ben & Ashu, TryHackMe Co-Founders.

Looking for a job? Join our team and help half a million users learn cyber security!

• Content Engineer, to help us create interactive training content.
• Growth Engineer, to run experiments and help with our product-led growth.
• Software Engineer, to help build the platform for hundreds of thousands of users.