MODULE 01
Cybersecurity Fundamentals
- CIA triad
- Threats
- Vulnerabilities
- Exploits
- Cybersecurity risk
- Security controls
- Attack surfaces
- Least privilege
- Defense in depth
- Shared responsibility
Breaches happen every single day. Every government, hospital, bank and factory on earth is hiring. And the training industry has priced the knowledge out of reach for most of the planet — three days of slide decks, a $300 exam, a $49 practice test, $200 for the cloud labs, and an $80 fee every year to stop the certificate expiring. Rocheston ended it. ZelHack costs $1.99 — the complete Ethical Hacking course, all 221 hands-on labs, every audio lecture and access to the Zelfire enterprise platform suite, on the phone you already own.
The expensive path still charges separately for exams, practice tests, cloud labs, and annual certificate maintenance.
Learn with beautiful, animated ZelCards, the complete Ethical Hacking course, and all audio lectures on the phone you already own.
There is no shortage of people who want to work in cybersecurity. There is a shortage of people who can afford to be trained. Those are completely different problems, and the industry has spent twenty years selling the second one as the first.
A three-day classroom course costs around $3,000. The exam is another $300. The practice test is $49 on the App Store. Access to the cloud-based labs — the only part that builds actual skill — is another $200. Then they charge you $80 every single year just to keep the certificate you already earned from expiring. For a student in Lagos, Dhaka, Manila, Nairobi or Caracas, that is not a career investment — it is a closed door with a price tag nailed to it.
Meanwhile the same vendors publish press releases about the talent shortage. They lock three billion people out of the knowledge, then hold conferences about why nobody has the knowledge.
ZelHack costs $1.99. That buys the complete Ethical Hacking Fundamentals course, all 221 hands-on labs and every Haja Mo audio lecture. ZelHack Enterprise is an annual subscription of $4.99 a year, and it unlocks the full RCCE curriculum — all 3,700 ZelCards across 35 deep-dive modules. Zero data collection, no login, no account. Not a sampler. Not a companion app. The whole curriculum.
The cybersecurity workforce gap is now measured in millions of unfilled roles worldwide, and it has widened almost every year that anybody has measured it. Not because the work is impossibly hard. Because the on-ramp is priced like a luxury good.
Every year the industry announces the shortage has grown. Every year the price of entry stays the same. These two facts are related.
The industry says people are not interested. That is not true — look at how many people teach themselves from free videos, forums and write-ups every night after work. What they cannot do is cross the final gap: structured curriculum, real labs, and a credential an employer recognises.
That gap has a gate on it. The gate has a turnstile. The turnstile costs three thousand dollars.
Here is the receipt almost every aspiring cybersecurity professional is handed. Not for a degree. Not for a year of study. For a few days in a room.
Drawn to scale, ZelHack is almost impossible to see next to a single traditional seat. That is not a design flourish. That is the ratio.
In dozens of countries, $3,629 is more than an entire year of median income. It is a house deposit. It is a family's savings. Asking a talented eighteen-year-old in a developing economy to hand that over for three days of slides is not education policy — it is gatekeeping with a syllabus stapled to it.
And the worst part is not the price. It is that the knowledge behind the paywall is not even good. Recycled decks. Vendor marketing dressed as curriculum. Labs that were broken in 2019 and are still broken now.
They locked three billion people out of cybersecurity knowledge — and then went on stage to warn everybody about the talent shortage they created.
There is a young person in Lagos right now who understands networking better than half the certified professionals in the industry. She learned it from free videos on a cracked phone screen, on borrowed data, at night, after work.
She will never hold a certification. Not because she cannot pass the exam — she would pass it comfortably. Because the training path costs more than her family earns in a year, and there is no arrangement, no payment plan and no scholarship queue short enough to change that.
Multiply her by three billion. That is the actual shape of the cybersecurity skills shortage.
A first-year certification path in the traditional market costs roughly $3,629. Here is what that number actually means in the places where the world most urgently needs defenders.
| COUNTRY | APPROX. AVERAGE ANNUAL INCOME | COST OF ONE CERT PATH | ZELHACK |
|---|---|---|---|
| Democratic Rep. of Congo | ~$650 | 5.6 years of income | ~1 day |
| Uganda | ~$960 | 3.8 years of income | ~1 day |
| Ethiopia | ~$1,020 | 3.6 years of income | ~1 day |
| Nepal | ~$1,340 | 2.7 years of income | < 1 day |
| Pakistan | ~$1,500 | 2.4 years of income | < 1 day |
| Nigeria | ~$1,900 | 1.9 years of income | < 1 day |
| Kenya | ~$1,950 | 1.9 years of income | < 1 day |
| Ghana | ~$2,340 | 1.6 years of income | < 1 day |
| India | ~$2,540 | 1.4 years of income | < 1 day |
| Bangladesh | ~$2,800 | 1.3 years of income | < 1 day |
| Philippines | ~$4,230 | 10 months of income | ~2 hours |
| Vietnam | ~$4,180 | 10 months of income | ~2 hours |
Income figures are approximate gross national income per capita (World Bank, Atlas method), rounded for illustration. Actual household income varies enormously within every country. The comparison is directional, not precise — and the direction is the entire point.
In every country on this chart, the same $3,629 buys more than a thousand ZelHack seats. In several of them, it is longer than a person's entire working savings horizon.
Read the third column again. In more than a dozen countries, the entry ticket to a cybersecurity career costs more than a person earns in two, three or five years — before food, rent, transport or anything else. It is not expensive. It is arithmetically impossible.
We do not have a shortage of people who want to defend systems. We have a shortage of people permitted to learn how.
Even a student who somehow raises the fee runs into five more barriers that nobody in the industry ever mentions, because nobody designing these programmes has ever had to think about them.
The countries priced out of cybersecurity education are not somewhere on the periphery of this problem. They are at the centre of it.
They are digitising fastest — mobile money, national identity systems, online government services, hospital records — often on limited budgets, with lean teams and legacy infrastructure. They are targeted heavily precisely because defences are thin. And when a bank, a hospital network or a power utility in a developing economy is breached, the consequences fall on people with no financial cushion at all.
So the industry has built a system where the places with the greatest need for defenders have the least access to the training that creates them. Then it holds annual conferences about the talent shortage, and sells the recordings.
"I passed every practice question I could find online. I have never been able to afford the exam voucher."
— A REALITY FOR MILLIONS"The course was $3,000. My father earns that in eighteen months. I did not ask him."
— A REALITY FOR MILLIONS"I had the money saved. Then I found out I needed a credit card that works internationally. I do not have one."
— A REALITY FOR MILLIONS"I study on my phone on the bus. Every course I find needs a laptop I do not own."
— A REALITY FOR MILLIONSComposite statements reflecting barriers described widely by learners in emerging economies. Illustrative, not direct quotations from named individuals.
Every design decision in ZelHack exists because of the six barriers above. Not as charity. As engineering.
Requires a laptop, an international credit card, stable power, fast broadband, three days off work, possibly a passport and travel — then $80 every year, forever.
Runs on the phone already in their pocket. Paid through the App Store in local currency. Studied offline, at 5am or midnight, in whatever fragments of time exist. No renewal fee. No account. No data collected.
In most of the countries in that table, $1.99 is under a day's income — for many, a couple of hours. It is a bus fare. It is a bowl of rice. It is small enough that the price stops being the decision, and the only remaining question becomes whether the person is willing to do the work.
That is the entire objective. Not to make training cheaper. To make cost irrelevant, so that talent — which is distributed evenly across the human race — finally gets to compete on equal terms with money, which is not.
Talent is everywhere. Opportunity is not. We just removed the price from the equation and left only the effort.
At Rocheston we said enough. We took the complete RCCE technical body of knowledge — offensive and defensive, systems, networks, cloud, forensics, AI security — and built it into an app that runs entirely on a mobile phone. Because everybody carries a phone. Most of the world does not carry a laptop.
Swipe · Master · Quiz · Flip · Done. Five minutes a day across 35 deep-dive modules. Master them all and you walk into the RCCE Level 1 exam ready.
Real attack and defence scenarios that build genuine technical skill — not screenshots of somebody else doing it.
A complete engineered curriculum from first principles to incident response, cloud security and AI threats.
Full spoken lessons for every module. Learn on the train, in the gym, walking home. No screen required.
Interactive quizzes throughout so you know what you actually know — before an exam tells you.
Train on real XDR, SIEM, SOAR, breach simulation, identity control and post-quantum encryption platforms — exclusively licensed to RCCE engineers.
No login. No account. No tracking. Everything runs on your device. Your learning stays yours.
ZelHack Standard is $1.99. Not a trial. Not a teaser. For the price of a coffee you get the complete Ethical Hacking Fundamentals course, full access to all 221 hands-on labs, and every Haja Mo audio lecture in the program. That alone is more real training than most $3,000 classroom seats deliver.
ZelHack Enterprise is an annual subscription — $4.99 per year. It unlocks the complete RCCE curriculum: all 3,700 ZelCards across 35 deep-dive modules, every quiz, every lesson, and the full path to certification eligibility. One subscription, renewed yearly, and the entire library stays open.
One ninety-nine to start. Four ninety-nine a year for the complete RCCE curriculum. That is the whole price list. There is nothing else to buy, no courseware bundle, no upsell, no renewal trap.
Same career. Same job market. Same salary at the end of it. Here is what each one actually buys you.
Nobody learns cybersecurity engineering by sitting in a room for three days and then never opening the material again. That is not education — it is an event with catering.
ZelHack is built on the ZelCards Micro-Learning Method™. One card, one concept, one technique — distilled into something your brain absorbs in sixty seconds and still has a year later. Like taking one vitamin a day, you take one ZelCard a day for your cybersecurity engineering skill.
Five minutes a day. No textbooks. No PDFs. No ninety-minute compliance videos. No cramming the night before an exam hall.
They are visual, interactive and built to make each concept stick. Explore these twelve ZelCards, then flip each one to reveal the character artwork on the reverse.
↻ HOVER TO FLIP · ON MOBILE, TAP TO FLIP AND TAP AGAIN TO RETURN
The reason most cybersecurity training fails is not the content. It is that nobody opens it twice. ZelHack is engineered around the attention span that actually exists in 2026 — not the one training vendors pretend exists.
Three days in a classroom is an event you attend once. Five minutes a day is a skill you actually keep.
And it compounds. One card a day is 365 cards a year. Master the full deck of 3,700 ZelCards across all 35 modules and you have not crammed for an exam — you have built a working engineer's knowledge, one verified concept at a time, and you walk into the RCCE Level 1 exam already ready.
This is not a list of buzzwords. It is a deliberately sequenced curriculum that starts with how a computer actually works and ends with you reconstructing a full breach from evidence. Every module builds on the last.
The full course outline below is organized exactly as the training sequence: thirty modules, each broken into the specific concepts learners work through.
Modules 01–30 are shown in full from the supplied course outline. The full ZelHack Enterprise library spans 35 deep-dive modules, including blockchain security, quantum readiness and next-generation defensive engineering.
You cannot learn to break into a system by watching a slide about it, and you cannot learn to defend one by memorising a definition. ZelHack ships with the full Rocheston Cyber Labs range — real environments, real tooling, real attack and defence scenarios you run yourself.
Study the concepts on your phone. Then sit down at any desktop and actually do it — enumerate the target, exploit the flaw, read the logs, catch the intrusion, write the report.
Cloud lab access, billed separately. On top of the course fee, on top of the exam voucher, on top of the practice test. The one part of the whole programme that actually builds skill — and it is an upsell.
All 221 labs included in the $1.99. Nothing billed separately, no lab tier, no per-hour metering, no add-on at checkout. Plus access to the Zelfire enterprise platform suite on top of it.
Think about what that pricing decision says. They know the labs are where the learning happens — that is precisely why it sits behind its own paywall. The part that makes you employable is the part they charge extra for.
Both lab platforms are live and open right now. Click through, browse the range, read the lab titles, see the depth for yourself — then go and compare it against what a $3,000 course actually hands you. We are not asking you to trust marketing copy. We are asking you to check.
Note: labs require a desktop computer to run. Study every concept, card and lecture on your phone — then practise the attacks and defences on any machine you can get to. A shared computer at a library or a college lab is enough.
Here is the gap nobody in the training industry talks about. You can pass a certification without ever touching a real enterprise security platform — and then walk into your first job and be handed one on day one.
Every serious defensive role runs on tooling: detection platforms, response consoles, breach simulation, access control, encryption infrastructure. Traditional training shows you slides about those tools. Screenshots. Maybe a vendor demo video recorded in 2021.
ZelHack students get access to Zelfire — Rocheston's own suite of realistic, enterprise-grade security platforms. Not a simulation. Not a diagram. The actual engineered products, invented and built by Rocheston, and exclusively licensed to RCCE engineers.
Name one certification vendor that hands a student an entire enterprise security platform suite to train on.
We will make this easy. Do not take our word for anything.
You will find recorded lectures. You will find slide decks. You will find a lab range, if you paid the extra fee. You will not find XDR, SIEM, SOAR, breach simulation, identity control, post-quantum encryption, a DevSecOps pipeline and a phishing platform handed to the learner as part of the training — because building that is not a course, it is a decade of engineering.
Rocheston built the platforms first, and then built the training around them. That is the difference, and it is the one thing on this page that cannot be matched by lowering a price.
This is what closes the gap between a certificate and competence. A graduate who has hunted in an XDR console, tuned rules in a SIEM, written a SOAR playbook, run a breach simulation against their own detections and configured Zero Trust access is not entry level in any meaningful sense — regardless of what their first job title says.
And it is included in the same training programme that costs $1.99 to start.
Most people who want into this field do not have three uninterrupted days. They have a commute, a night shift, a walk home, a queue. So every module in ZelHack ships with a complete audio lecture — taught, not narrated.
Thirty-plus deep-dive audio lessons, taught conversationally from first principles — with worked examples, real breach walkthroughs and self-check questions built into every session. No jargon wall. No slide reading. Just somebody explaining it to you properly, the way it should have been explained the first time.
Listen on the train. Listen while you cook. Listen twice. The concepts land the same way they would in a classroom — except this classroom starts at $1.99 and travels with you.
The Rocheston Certified Cybersecurity Engineer is a globally recognised certification that employers and enterprises actively seek. It is ANAB-accredited under ISO/IEC 17024 and U.S. Government recognised under DoD 8140 for 16 specific cybersecurity job roles.
Start at $1.99 with the full Ethical Hacking course, 221 labs and every audio lecture. Subscribe to Enterprise — $4.99 a year — to unlock the complete RCCE curriculum: all 3,700 ZelCards across 35 modules.
$1.99 · $4.99/yrA one-time in-app purchase issues your RCCE Eligibility Certificate, confirming verified completion of the full curriculum and qualifying you to sit the official exam.
$299 one-timePass it and you earn the full RCCE credential — recognised and actively sought in corporate, government and defence sectors worldwide.
Rocheston examThe ZelCards are your exam preparation. There is no separate practice test to buy, no upsell, no courseware bundle. Master the cards and you walk into the exam ready.
| WHAT YOU NEED | TRADITIONAL VENDOR | ZELHACK ENTERPRISE |
|---|---|---|
| Core training course | ✕~$3,000 for three days | ✓Included — 35 modules, self-paced, with an active subscription |
| Learning content volume | ✕A slide deck and a workbook | ✓3,700 interactive ZelCards |
| Hands-on labs | ✕A handful, often outdated | ✓221 real lab scenarios |
| Enterprise platform access | ✕Slides and demo videos about tools | ✓Zelfire suite — XDR, SIEM, SOAR, ZelBreach, ZelEn |
| Cloud lab access | ✕$200 separate purchase | ✓Included |
| Audio lessons | ✕Not offered | ✓Full spoken lecture per module |
| Practice tests | ✕$49 separate App Store purchase | ✓Quizzes built in throughout |
| Device required | ✕Laptop plus classroom attendance | ✓The phone in your pocket |
| Accreditation | ✕Varies by vendor | ✓ANAB / ISO 17024 · DoD 8140 |
| Annual certification fee | ✕$80 every year, forever, or it expires | ✓No certification maintenance fee. Curriculum subscription renews at $4.99/year. |
| Account & tracking | ✕Login required, data collected | ✓No login. No account. Zero data. |
| Entry price | ✕$3,000 before you learn anything | ✓$4.99/year — full RCCE curriculum, 221 labs, all audio |
| TOTAL FIRST YEAR | $3,629 + $80 EVERY YEAR AFTER | $4.99 / YEAR |
ZelHack is $1.99 — full Ethical Hacking course, all 221 labs, all audio lectures. ZelHack Enterprise is an annual subscription of $4.99/year and unlocks the full RCCE curriculum — all 3,700 ZelCards across 35 modules. RCCE Eligibility Certificate is a separate one-time $299 in-app purchase, taken only when you are ready to certify. Learning does not require it.
Per-seat licensing does not just make training expensive. It quietly decides who is allowed to be trained — and the answer is always the same handful of people in the IT department.
So the organisation buys three seats, sends three specialists on a course, and leaves everybody else — the people attackers actually target — with a fifteen-minute compliance video once a year.
One seat. One certification path. $3,629 in the first year, plus $80 every year after.
The same $3,629 buys 1,823 ZelHack seats at $1.99. Everyone. Not the security team — everyone.
Figures use the $1.99 ZelHack base purchase. ZelHack Enterprise annual subscription at $4.99/year per person where the full RCCE curriculum is required. Illustrative arithmetic; App Store pricing varies by territory.
Same money. One of these grids is a single hairline. The other is a town.
Go back through this curriculum and look at who actually gets attacked. Not the security engineer with two certifications. The people nobody ever thought to train.
Attackers do not attack your org chart. They attack whoever picks up the phone. If you only train the people with "security" in their job title, you have trained the only people who were never the target.
Every organisation on earth has made the same calculation. Training is expensive, therefore training is rationed, therefore only the specialists get it, therefore the janitor, the driver and the receptionist — the actual attack surface — get a poster in the break room.
That calculation only ever made sense because the price was absurd. Remove the price, and the rationing stops making sense too.
At $1.99 a person, "who should we train?" stops being a budget question. The answer becomes obvious and it becomes affordable at the same moment: everyone who works here. Everyone who can be phoned, emailed, followed through a door or handed a USB stick.
And if you have budget left over after covering all two hundred of your staff — and you will, because you will have spent under four hundred dollars — you could train every adult in the town your office sits in for what the industry charges to send one manager on one course.
One seat, or one town. That is the actual choice on the table, and it always was.
↓ AND HERE IS HOW AN ORGANISATION ACTUALLY BUYS IT, DEPLOYS IT AND PROVES IT
Training everybody is only half the problem. The other half is proving it happened — to your board, your auditor, your insurer and your regulator.
Most platforms solve that by holding your workforce's training records on their servers, and charging you a per-seat licence for the privilege. ZelHack solves it the opposite way.
Buy ZelHack licences in bulk through Apple Business Manager and distribute them to your workforce like any other managed app.
No personal App Store accounts required. No employee out of pocket. No expense claims. Assign, revoke and reassign licences as people join and leave.
Deploy through your existing MDM alongside everything else on the device.
Five minutes a day. Swipe, master, quiz, flip, done. No classroom, no travel, no lost working days, no scheduling around shifts.
Works offline, so the warehouse, the ward, the depot and the shop floor are covered as well as head office.
Each learner produces a cryptographically signed completion export when they finish.
Your people upload their signed export to your own dashboard, running on your own server. It verifies the signature, rejects anything tampered with, and builds the compliance picture.
Completion rates, module coverage, engagement, certificate register, exceptions — and a full auditor evidence package on demand.
Rocheston never sees any of it.
This is the part no training vendor offers, because their business model depends on holding your data. The dashboard is software you run — one container, on your infrastructure, inside your network. Your workforce's training evidence never touches a Rocheston server, because there is no Rocheston server in the path.
SIXTY SECONDS TO A RUNNING COMPLIANCE DASHBOARD ON YOUR OWN INFRASTRUCTURE
Security-awareness and role-based training obligations appear in essentially every framework an organisation is measured against. The dashboard exists to produce that evidence in a form an assessor accepts — dated, signed, verifiable and exportable.
▣ Pull the container — hub.docker.com/r/rocheston/zpdAsk any training platform where your employees' records live. The honest answer is: on their servers, in their cloud, under their retention policy, subject to their breach exposure and their subpoena risk.
Which means your workforce compliance data is now a third-party risk on your own register — the exact thing Module 30 teaches you to interrogate.
We cannot lose, sell, leak or be compelled to hand over data we never possess. That is not a policy promise. It is an architecture.
The dashboard is software you deploy, not a per-seat SaaS subscription. Combine it with volume purchasing and the whole picture is: licences at $1.99 a person, the full RCCE curriculum at $4.99 per person per year where you need it, and a compliance dashboard running on infrastructure you already own.
Two hundred employees trained, tracked, and audit-evidenced — for less than the cost of sending one manager on one three-day course.
We are not going to tell you what anybody else charges. We are going to ask you to spend ten minutes finding out — because the moment you see the numbers with your own eyes, this argument is over.
Open a new tab. Search for any cybersecurity certification, any instructor-led course, any bootcamp, any cloud lab subscription. Go to the official pricing page. Read the number. Then read the renewal terms underneath it.
Here is your checklist. Price every line for yourself, from the providers of your choosing, and add it up.
Match $1.99
Full Ethical Hacking Fundamentals course. All 221 hands-on labs — not a $200 add-on. Every audio lecture. No account. No tracking. Zero data collected.
To every certification vendor, every training company and every learning platform in this industry: match it. Not a discount code. Not a first-month promotion. Not a scholarship application with a waiting list. The same depth of training, the same lab access, for one dollar ninety-nine, available to a student in Lagos, Dhaka, Manila or Caracas tonight.
And no annual maintenance fee. We do not charge you $80 a year for the rest of your life to keep something you already earned.
We will wait.
And while you are checking — look at what they actually give you for the money. Count the labs. Count the hours. Ask whether the content is anything a chatbot could not produce in four seconds. Then ask yourself who the price is really protecting.
Most education apps are data businesses wearing a mortarboard. They want your email, your device identifiers, your behaviour, your contacts — and they sell the profile. ZelHack was built the opposite way, on purpose.
Everything runs on your device. Your progress is yours. Your learning is yours. There is nothing on our side to breach, subpoena, sell or leak — because the safest data is the data nobody ever collected.
That is not a marketing position. It is the same principle we teach in Module 30: data minimisation is the most effective security control that almost nobody classifies as security.
Cybersecurity is not a luxury skill. It protects hospitals, power grids, banks, schools and every ordinary person with a phone. Rationing that knowledge behind a three-thousand-dollar turnstile does not protect the profession. It weakens the entire world's defence, and then bills you for the privilege.
The talent is out there. It is in Lagos and Chennai and Jakarta and São Paulo and Cairo. It is sitting on a bus right now with a phone in its hand and no way in.
You do not need a bootcamp. You do not need a three-day classroom. You do not need a certification vendor's permission. Download ZelHack. Work the cards. Run the labs. Take the quizzes. Certify when you are ready.
That is how you disrupt an industry — not by complaining about gatekeepers, but by making them unnecessary.
Every other decision on this page requires thought. This one does not. You are not weighing a $3,000 commitment, a loan, three days off work or a year of your life. You are deciding whether to spend one dollar ninety-nine.
That is the whole comparison. A career-grade curriculum, 221 hands-on labs, every audio lecture and access to an enterprise security platform suite — for less than the cheapest thing you will buy today without thinking about it.
You download it, try a few cards, decide cybersecurity is not for you, and delete it. You are out one dollar ninety-nine. No subscription running in the background, no account to close, no data anywhere to delete, nobody emailing you about it for the next four years.
You work the cards, run the labs, sit the RCCE exam, and walk into a profession with millions of unfilled roles worldwide and an average cybersecurity engineer salary around $150,000 a year. From a $1.99 decision made on a Tuesday.
You will not find another decision this year where the downside is a coffee and the upside is a career. Not one.
We know what "$1.99" usually means. A hook price, an account, a card on file, an auto-renewing trap and a marketing list you can never leave. So here is exactly what you are not signing up for.
Every other cybersecurity programme asks you to commit thousands of dollars and hope. This one asks you to spend two dollars and find out.
So stop reading the page and go and try it. If it is not for you, you have lost a coffee. And if it is — and for a great many people it will be — you have just found the thing you do for the next twenty years, on a Tuesday, for less than the change in your pocket.
The complete Ethical Hacking Fundamentals course, all 221 hands-on labs, every Haja Mo audio lecture and access to the Zelfire enterprise platform suite.
Less than a coffee. No account. No tracking. Nothing to lose.
ZelHack Enterprise — annual subscription, $4.99/year — unlocks the full RCCE curriculum: all 3,700 ZelCards across 35 deep-dive modules · No account · No tracking · Zero data collected
Cybersecurity Engineer is a registered trademark of Rocheston.
Everything people ask before they download — pricing, certification, labs, privacy and enterprise deployment.
ZelHack Standard is a one-time $1.99 purchase on the App Store. It includes the complete Ethical Hacking Fundamentals course, full access to all 221 hands-on labs, and every Haja Mo audio lecture. ZelHack Enterprise is an annual subscription of $4.99 per year, which unlocks the full RCCE curriculum: all 3,700 interactive ZelCards across 35 deep-dive modules.
No. ZelHack is a paid app priced at $1.99 as a one-time purchase. There is no free tier, no trial and no advertising. The price is deliberately set low so that cybersecurity training is affordable to people in every country, rather than restricted to those who can pay thousands of dollars for a classroom seat.
RCCE stands for Rocheston Certified Cybersecurity Engineer. It is a globally recognised cybersecurity engineering certification that employers and enterprises actively seek. RCCE is ANAB-accredited under ISO/IEC 17024 and is recognised by the U.S. Government under DoD 8140 for 16 specific cybersecurity job roles in the DCWF framework.
There are three steps. First, complete the curriculum in ZelHack Enterprise — all 3,700 ZelCards across 35 modules. Second, unlock the RCCE Eligibility Certificate through a one-time in-app purchase of $299, which confirms verified completion and qualifies you to sit the official exam. Third, attempt and pass the RCCE Level 1 exam at Rocheston to earn the full RCCE credential.
No laptop is required to study. All ZelCards, quizzes, modules and audio lectures run entirely on your iPhone. The hands-on labs do require access to a desktop or laptop computer to run, but you can study every concept on your phone first and practise the labs on any machine you can reach, including a shared or library computer.
No. The curriculum begins with how a computer actually works — CPU, memory, storage, processes and operating systems — before moving through networking, Linux, Windows, cryptography and identity. Every module builds on the last, so a complete beginner can start at Module 01 and progress to incident response, cloud security and AI security by the end.
ZelCards are the interactive micro-learning cards at the heart of ZelHack. Each card teaches one concept, technique, attack or defence. The daily ritual is Swipe, Master, Quiz, Flip, Done — roughly five minutes a day. Cards are animated and flip to reveal the underlying mechanics on the back, and mastery is verified by quiz rather than assumed. ZelHack contains 3,700 ZelCards across 35 modules.
221 hands-on labs are included at the $1.99 price, covering network scanning and enumeration, Linux and Windows hardening, traffic capture and analysis, web application exploitation, password and credential attacks, privilege escalation, malware behaviour analysis, SIEM and log investigation, incident response and forensics, cloud and container security, firewall and IDS configuration, and threat hunting.
Zelfire is Rocheston's suite of enterprise-grade security platforms, including ZelXDR for extended detection and response, ZelSIEM, ZelSOAR for orchestration and automated response, ZelBreach for breach and attack simulation, ZelAccess for identity and Zero Trust control, and ZelEn for post-quantum encryption. Zelfire is exclusively licensed to RCCE engineers, and ZelHack students train on the real platforms rather than screenshots of them.
The ZelCards method is designed around roughly five minutes of study a day rather than an intensive multi-day course. At one card a day you would cover 365 cards a year, and most learners work through considerably more. The pace is entirely your own — the curriculum does not expire, there are no scheduled classes and there is no cohort to keep up with.
No. ZelHack requires no account and no login, collects no analytics, and runs entirely on your device. There are no trackers and no behavioural profiling. The only network activity is the anonymous, untracked download of content packs. Your learning progress stays on your phone and is never transmitted to Rocheston or any third party.
Yes. Organisations can purchase ZelHack licences in volume through Apple Business Manager and distribute them to staff through their existing mobile device management system. No employee needs a personal App Store account or has to pay out of pocket, and licences can be reassigned as people join and leave the organisation.
Through the ZelHack Private Dashboard, which is self-hosted software an organisation runs on its own infrastructure, distributed as a container. Each learner produces a cryptographically signed completion export, which the employer uploads to the dashboard. It verifies the ECDSA P-256 signature, rejects tampered or incomplete files, and produces workforce coverage figures, module-level tracking, a certificate register, exception reporting, printable auditor-grade reports and a full evidence package with a SHA-256 manifest.
On the organisation's own server. The ZelHack Private Dashboard runs inside the customer's own network, so workforce training records never reach a Rocheston server. Rocheston cannot lose, sell, leak or be compelled to disclose data it never possesses. This also removes the training platform from the organisation's third-party risk register.
Security awareness and role-based training obligations appear in essentially every major framework, including SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, GDPR, NIS2 and PCI DSS. The ZelHack Private Dashboard produces dated, signed and verifiable completion evidence in a form assessors accept, including attestation blocks with control owner and reviewer signature lines.
ZelHack Standard is a one-time purchase with no renewal requirement, and ZelHack Enterprise is a $4.99 annual subscription for continued access to the full curriculum. This differs from the common industry practice of charging an annual certification maintenance fee, frequently around $80 per year, purely to prevent an already-earned certificate from lapsing.
A traditional certification path commonly costs around $3,000 for a three-day instructor-led course, $300 for an exam voucher, $49 for a practice test, $200 for cloud lab access and roughly $80 a year in certification maintenance — approximately $3,629 in the first year. ZelHack delivers a complete curriculum, 221 labs, full audio lectures and enterprise platform access from $1.99. Readers are encouraged to verify current pricing directly with any provider.
Thirty-five deep-dive modules spanning cybersecurity fundamentals, how computers work, networking, internet protocols, web and cloud fundamentals, Linux and Windows essentials, identity and access management, cryptography, secure architecture, threat actors, malware and ransomware, social engineering, OSINT, ethical hacking rules, the cyberattack lifecycle, reconnaissance, scanning and enumeration, vulnerability management, web application security, credential attacks, network and wireless security, API and mobile security, endpoint security and EDR, SIEM and detection engineering, SOC operations and threat hunting, incident response and digital forensics, cloud and DevSecOps, threat intelligence and AI security, and risk, governance, privacy and cybersecurity careers.
This page does not name, identify or single out any specific training provider, certification body, platform or company. All commentary refers to general practices and commonly advertised pricing across the cybersecurity training market as a whole.
Any third-party company names, product names, service names, logos and trademarks that may appear anywhere on this site are the property of their respective owners, and no affiliation, association, sponsorship, endorsement, partnership or approval is implied in either direction.
Rocheston is an independent training and certification body and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, sponsored by or in partnership with any other training provider or certification organisation. Any comparison presented here is Rocheston's own commentary on general market practice, and is not directed at any individual company.
The cost figures used in the comparisons on this page (course fees, exam vouchers, practice tests, cloud lab access and annual certification maintenance fees) are illustrative of commonly advertised pricing in the cybersecurity training market at the time of writing. They are not attributed to, and do not represent, the pricing of any specific named organisation.
Third-party pricing varies by vendor, product, tier, region, currency, promotion, bundle and date, and changes without notice. Rocheston makes no representation or warranty as to any third party's current pricing. Readers are expressly invited to verify all pricing directly on each provider's own official website before drawing any conclusion.
ZelHack pricing is set through the Apple App Store and is subject to regional currency conversion, applicable taxes, App Store terms and price tier changes. The $1.99 base purchase and $4.99 per year Enterprise subscription are stated in USD and may differ in your territory.
Features, module counts, ZelCard counts and lab counts reflect the current release and may change as the curriculum is expanded or updated. Subscriptions renew in accordance with App Store terms and can be managed or cancelled in your Apple account settings.
Completion of the ZelHack curriculum and purchase of the RCCE Eligibility Certificate confirms verified completion of the training content and qualifies a candidate to sit the official RCCE examination. It is not itself the RCCE credential and does not guarantee a passing result. The RCCE credential is awarded only upon successfully passing the official Rocheston examination.
Accreditation and recognition statements (ANAB / ISO/IEC 17024, DoD 8140 job-role mapping) refer to the RCCE certification program and are current as of publication; readers should confirm current status with the relevant accrediting or recognising body.
Salary figures, job-growth statements and workforce-shortage figures are drawn from published third-party industry research and are provided for general context only. They are industry averages and projections, not a promise, guarantee or representation of employment, income or career outcome for any individual. Results depend on skill, experience, location, employer and market conditions.
Statistics cited on this page, including the global cybersecurity workforce gap and projected global cost of cybercrime, are attributed to their published sources in the References section above. Rocheston does not own this research, makes no claim of authorship, and figures reflect the most recent published estimates known at the time of writing. Third-party estimates vary in methodology and may be revised.
This page links to websites operated by third parties. Rocheston does not control, monitor, endorse or accept responsibility for the content, accuracy, availability, pricing or privacy practices of any external site. Links are provided for the reader's own independent verification and convenience only.
ZelHack teaches offensive and defensive security techniques for lawful, ethical and explicitly authorised purposes only — including authorised penetration testing, security research, and the defence of systems you own or have written permission to test.
Accessing, testing, scanning or interfering with computer systems, networks or data without express written authorisation is unlawful in most jurisdictions and may constitute a criminal offence. Learners are solely responsible for their own conduct and for complying with all applicable laws and regulations. Rocheston accepts no liability for misuse of the material.
Hands-on labs require access to a desktop or laptop computer and an internet connection. Course content, ZelCards, quizzes and audio lectures are fully accessible on mobile. Lab availability, content and platform access may change over time.
Rocheston, ZelHack, ZelSafe, ZelCards, RCCE and Cybersecurity Engineer are trademarks or registered trademarks of Rocheston. Apple, the Apple logo and App Store are trademarks of Apple Inc., registered in the U.S. and other countries. All other marks are the property of their respective owners.
The content of this page is provided for general informational and educational purposes and represents Rocheston's own opinion and commentary on the cybersecurity education market. It does not constitute legal, financial, professional or career advice. Information is provided "as is" without warranty of any kind, and may be updated or corrected at any time without notice.
If you believe any statement on this page is inaccurate, please contact Rocheston and it will be reviewed promptly.