Corelan’s commitment to quality is a no BS promise from a senior and highly technical individual backed by decades of working in the trench
There might be a misconception that people have after having attended the training once that they grasp the material, or that they gotten all the value from Corelan, because they have heard the explanation, they have gotten the actual materials, and the rest is “working through the materials on their own”. Having attended the Heap exploitation “Advanced” class, the Heap Masterclass, is more than just a rebranding of the same course. While fundamentally the nature of heap exploitation will always remain the focus of the class, no class is exactly the same and personally I experienced a 40% difference in terms of the entire experience of the class. Peter is still working on refining the delivery of complex concepts even having done this for years, and having actually worked on the different labs and homeworks, when I asked Peter about exploit development best practices which I encountered, he was able to answer them, and also integrate them into the course material for future students.
The intense four days training also inherently carries a different form of value: you are essentially rewiring your own mind. The course is so well structured that the fast paced and intense nature of Peter’s delivery, in order to deliver his twenty year’s worth of expertise, is different even on a second attendance, because while conceptually you think you already understand the materials, having worked through them previously, it is another thing entirely to be able to start reasoning with an unknown problem via the nature of the different versions of the windows heap.
Peter is well known for his knowledge of stack and heap exploitation, but most people might end up defining him that way and think that having met him in that context once, it is no longer necessary to attend his classes again. What they fail to recognise is that the depth from the quality of his response to the speed and fluidity of his reasoning, that stack and heap exploitation which are domains he chose to build a class around, and as any individual with decades of commitment towards a given craft, there is no way that knowledge transfer in its entirety can occur, and thus there is much value in attending it again.
The course never fails to draw the smartest crowd no matter which country it conducts itself in. One might argue it is relative to the niche nature of the course, but the value of being able to network with within this context is priceless as it is almost always extremely difficult to fill a room with such technically advanced individuals consistently for days on end. During the moments of the course where we are able to socialize, there are just paradigm shifting level of insights that you get from one another that really change how you approach technical work, and this is also not accounting for the professional connections that you also get to form in your career.
As a modern individual who is highly skeptical against marketing and sales, once you actually experience the value gained from Corelan’s commitment to quality, as written in the FAQ page, you realize as a technical individual that it is more than just words. It is a no BS promise from a senior and highly technical individual backed by decades of working in the trench.
