A single forum thread is doing what years of fragmented underground chatter rarely manages: giving novice threat actors a coherent, step-by-step path from curiosity to cash.
The Post That Spread Across Four Forums
The thread, titled “Hacking for Profit. Working method,” was written by a user calling himself “Hercules.” It isn’t a dense technical manual. It doesn’t require the reader to understand assembly language or reverse engineering. Its structure is closer to a career guide than an exploit writeup — and that’s precisely what made it travel. Flare researchers tracked the original post and its responses over several months, finding that the method was reposted and discussed across four additional forums beyond the original.
The engagement around the thread tells its own story. Multiple users thanked “Hercules” directly. Others described themselves as beginners who finally felt like they understood where to start. Several asked to connect with him privately, and a few said outright that they had completed hacking courses but still couldn’t apply anything in a real environment. The post didn’t just explain a technique — it answered a specific frustration that keeps surfacing in underground communities: the gap between learning and doing.
That gap is exactly what “Hercules” built his tutorial around. He frames most existing resources as too focused on computer science theory, operating systems internals, programming languages, or scanner configuration — none of which, he argues, is where beginners want to start. What beginners want, in his words, is to “hack,” “break in,” and “gain access.” The tutorial is designed to get there with the fewest prerequisites possible.
What makes the thread unusual isn’t just its content. It’s how openly it functions as a recruitment and mentorship signal. The response pattern — public praise, private connection requests, requests for ongoing guidance — suggests “Hercules” established himself as a credible figure within these communities, not just a one-time poster.
What the Tutorial Actually Covers
The tutorial’s technical core follows a recognizable offensive security workflow, but compressed and simplified. “Hercules” begins with vulnerability discovery: where to find newly disclosed vulnerabilities, with particular emphasis on high-impact classes including remote code execution, authentication bypass, account takeover, insecure direct object references (IDOR), and data exposure. From there, he moves to identifying exposed systems, checking whether those systems are likely vulnerable, and then deciding what to do with the results.
That last decision point is where the tutorial becomes structurally unusual. “Hercules” explicitly divides the workflow into a “legal” section and an “illegal” section. The reader can stop after the legal phase — finding the vulnerability and reporting it — or continue into exploitation and monetization. Framing the choice that way doesn’t just lower the psychological barrier; it presents exploitation as a natural continuation of a disclosure workflow rather than a separate category of activity entirely.
One specific tool gets named in the tutorial: Nuclei, the open-source vulnerability scanner developed by projectdiscovery.io. Nuclei is widely used in legitimate offensive security work, which is part of its appeal in this context. It has an active template community, strong documentation, and enough automation capability that a user with limited technical background can run meaningful scans without writing custom tooling. “Hercules” leans on this point — that public tools, community-built templates, and AI assistance have collectively reduced the barrier to entry in ways that didn’t exist even a few years ago.
Programming skills, he argues, are useful but not required to begin. That claim prompted one forum user to ask directly whether being unable to program would prevent them from getting started. The question itself illustrates how wide the intended audience is — and how effectively the tutorial was communicating its “anyone can do this” premise.
The educational blog by Yakir Kadkoda and Ilay Goldman, “50 Shades of Vulnerabilities: Uncovering Flaws in Open-Source Vulnerability Disclosure,” addresses the same territory “Hercules” touches: the realistic challenges defenders face when patching newly disclosed vulnerabilities. The timing and patching pressure that defenders operate under is something the tutorial treats as exploitable in its own right — not just a technical vulnerability, but an operational window.
The monetization angle is woven throughout rather than bolted on at the end. “Hercules” covers how to decide whether a discovered vulnerability should be reported through official channels, sold, or exploited directly. Each path has different risk and reward profiles, and the tutorial presents them as genuine choices rather than framing one as clearly preferable.
Why Tone Is Doing More Work Than Technique
The accessibility of the tutorial is the feature, not a side effect. Plenty of underground forums contain technically superior content — detailed exploitation writeups, working proof-of-concept code, advanced lateral movement techniques. What “Hercules” produced isn’t competing with that material. It’s targeting the layer beneath it: people who don’t yet know how to use the advanced content, people who are stuck between theory and practice, people who finished courses and still feel lost.
That positioning explains the response better than any individual technical point in the post. One user specifically said they had worked through multiple hacking courses without being able to apply them in a real-world context. That’s a common frustration, and it’s one the formal security education industry hasn’t fully solved either. Certifications teach concepts. Labs simulate controlled environments. The tutorial addresses something different: the mental model of how a real opportunistic attack actually unfolds, from scanning to money.
The plain language throughout isn’t a sign of carelessness. It’s deliberate. “Hercules” writes as if explaining something obvious to someone intelligent but new. There are no assumptions about prior knowledge, no jargon left unexplained, and no step that requires trusting the reader to figure out the details on their own. For a beginner trying to understand where to point their attention first, that’s more useful than a technically accurate but inaccessible writeup.
Flare’s analysis of the thread’s spread — four additional forums beyond the original — gives some indication of how these tutorials propagate. The method itself becomes a kind of shared curriculum. Different forum communities encounter it, discuss it, add context, and send it to people asking the same beginner questions “Hercules” originally answered. The tutorial doesn’t need to stay current to remain useful; the underlying workflow it describes applies to any newly disclosed CVE.
What that means for defenders is a volume problem more than a sophistication problem. The threat isn’t that one skilled actor learned something new from this post. It’s that a broader population of low-skill actors now has a coherent starting framework — and that population is asking for Nuclei templates, not zero-days.
