Ethical Hacking with Kali Linux
IBM · View on Coursera ↗
Taught by IBM Skills Network Team
Information TechnologyComputer Science
About the course
Kali Linux is the go-to operating system for penetration testers, ethical hackers, and security professionals. This course blends cybersecurity knowledge with practical applications to give you the job-ready skills you need to use Kali Linux effectively in just 5 weeks! Ethical hackers—also known as “white hat” hackers—test systems and networks to uncover vulnerabilities. They often use Kali Linux to conduct network monitoring, penetration testing, and security auditing, as it provides hundred
The dissent
The most-upvoted critical review (4 votes, 3.0★).
“Lot's of problems here. The course is essentially an overview of tool categories in Kali with some very light treatment of ethical hacking tradecraft. The actual labs barely touch on nmap, dig, whois, and hello-world-style Python. About half of the multiple choice questions have typically one answer that makes sense semantically and three nonsense answers - the course isn't really necessary to answer them correctly. Finally, there is project submission that is AI graded. The AI complained about capital letters in my commands that were not there, missing command switches that were clearly there, and it graded me at 100% for the four criteria provided for a small code submission, claimed I met "100% of criteria" for the assignment, then gave me a 4/5 or 80%. There must have originally been 5 criteria but they are not in the assignment and someone forgot to tell the AI. Finally, the lab environment for the project, which requires the use of whois, nmap, and dig, does not have those utilities installed and they can't be installed by the user. I had to go to an outside system to complete the assignment. …”
Excerpt. Read the full review on Coursera ↗
Coursera's 4.6 comes from 71 ratings. Of those, 4.2% are 1–2★.
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That measures what the most-endorsed reviews say, not “true quality.” The rating distribution above is the whole population, so you can see the sample next to it.
Reviews read on 23 Oct 2026.Read them on Coursera ↗