A few years ago I was exactly where a lot of you probably are right now: staring at a wall of penetration testing courses, half-finished Active Directory labs, and a YouTube playlist that promised to make me a "hacker" in 30 days. Most of it was theory. Some of it was outdated. Almost none of it explained why an attack worked, or how a defender would actually catch it.
So when I sat down to build out the Codelivly Offensive Security Series, I had one rule: no fluff. Every chapter had to earn its place by teaching something you could actually do in a lab, this week, and understand well enough to explain to someone else.
That series is now two books — Red Team Operator L1 and Red Team Operator L2 — and I want to walk you through what's actually inside them, because I think they solve a real problem in how offensive security is taught.
The problem with most red team content
Cybersecurity education has a split personality. On one side you've got theory-heavy books that explain what Kerberoasting is without ever putting you in a domain where you can try it. On the other, you've got scattered tool tutorials and one-off write-ups that teach you to run a command without teaching you why it worked or how it maps to a real engagement.
Neither builds the thing that actually gets people hired or promoted: a mental model of how enterprise attacks unfold from initial access to detection.
Red Team Operator L1: the foundation
L1 is built for the beginner who's serious about going pro — the SOC analyst who wants to cross over to offensive security, the student who's tired of tutorials that never go past "here's how Nmap works," the IT professional who wants to actually understand the attacks they're defending against.
It walks through the full arc of a foundational red team skill set: building a home lab with Kali, Windows, and Active Directory, networking fundamentals, OSINT and reconnaissance, scanning with Nmap and RustScan, web app testing with Burp Suite, the OWASP Top 10 (SQLi, XSS, SSRF, XXE, and friends), password attacks, Windows and Linux privilege escalation, and a first real pass at Active Directory — Kerberoasting, AS-REP Roasting, BloodHound, PowerView.
Every chapter follows the same shape: learning objectives, plain-English explanations, hands-on labs, real attack scenarios, command references, and — this part matters — detection and mitigation insights, so you're not just learning to break things, you're learning how a blue team would catch you doing it. Everything gets mapped back to MITRE ATT&CK, and the book closes the loop with how to write a professional pentest report, because half of red teaming is communicating what you found.
Red Team Operator L2: enterprise depth
L2 picks up where L1 leaves off and goes after the stuff that actually separates a junior tester from an operator who can run a real engagement: multi-domain Active Directory, Kerberos internals, Resource-Based Constrained Delegation, AD Certificate Services attacks, Shadow Credentials, DPAPI and credential harvesting, Pass-the-Hash and Pass-the-Ticket, lateral movement, and network pivoting with tools like Ligolo-ng and Chisel.
It also pushes into territory most beginner-to-intermediate material skips entirely: Microsoft Entra ID and Microsoft 365 security assessment, Docker and Kubernetes fundamentals, and operational security — how to plan and run an engagement without blowing your cover. The whole back half is built around Purple Team collaboration and detection engineering, because modern red teaming isn't a solo sport anymore; you're expected to work with the defenders, not just around them.
Labs are built on Kali Linux, Windows Server, Active Directory, Ubuntu, Entra ID, M365, Docker, and Kubernetes — and you'll get hands-on with the actual tools operators use day to day: BloodHound CE, SharpHound, Certipy, NetExec, Impacket, Rubeus, Responder, Wireshark, and more.
Who these are for
If you're a cybersecurity student, an aspiring ethical hacker, a SOC analyst eyeing offensive security, or a working pentester who wants a structured way to level up into enterprise engagements — this series was built for that path, in that order. L1 gets you lab-ready and confident with the fundamentals. L2 takes you into the environments and techniques that professional red teams actually operate in.
I built these because I wanted the resource I couldn't find when I was learning — something that respects your time, doesn't pad chapters with filler, and treats you like someone who's going to use this knowledge in the real world, not just pass a quiz.
Red Team Operator L1 → resources.codelivly.com/product/red-team-operator-l1
Red Team Operator L2 → resources.codelivly.com/product/red-team-operator-l2
If you read either one, I'd genuinely love to hear what you think — reach out on X @rocky_rowdy_ or drop a review on the store. This series is going to keep growing, and feedback from people actually doing the labs shapes what comes next.
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