Awesome Security - Curated Security Resources and Tools

sbilly/awesome-security is a long-running curated list of security tools, resources and reading — network security, monitoring, forensics, threat intelligence, books, courses. It is MIT licensed and it is large: 348 links across 524 lines of README.

For a security list, “is this still accurate” is not a cosmetic question. So we audited it.

What the audit found

We extracted every GitHub repository link and checked each one’s existence directly:

git ls-remote --exit-code https://github.com/<owner>/<repo>.git HEAD

Of 186 distinct repository links, 181 resolved and 5 did not: rozgo/anevicon, dtag-dev-sec/t-pot-autoinstall, jery0843/torforge, curiefense/curiefense and marcinguy/scanmycode-ce.

Two further entries initially flagged and turned out to be artefacts worth mentioning for accuracy. One is a GitHub App URL (github.com/apps/guardrails) rather than a repository, which this method cannot check. The other, 504ensicsLabs/LiME, is written in the README with a .git suffix in the URL — the repository exists; only our extraction was confused. Reporting those as dead would have been wrong, and separating them out is the difference between a measurement and a statistic.

So: a 2.7% dead-link rate, which for a list of this age is respectable rather than alarming.

The structural reason, and why it matters more here

Unlike some comparable lists, this repository contains no CI configuration at all — no .github/workflows, no automated link checking. It has three tracked files: the README, a contributing guide, and the licence.

That explains both the 2.7% and the risk profile going forward. Dead links are found when a human notices, and the most recent commit at the time of writing was 11 January 2026 — around nine months of no changes.

For a general-interest list, nine months is unremarkable. For a security list it deserves a sentence, because the field’s half-life is shorter. A tool that was the standard answer two years ago may be unmaintained, may have an unpatched CVE, or may have been superseded. The list tells you a project existed and was once recommended. It does not tell you it is currently safe to run.

Compare the one curated list we audited that does run automated checking — awesome-raspberry-pi has a seven-line workflow invoking a markdown link checker on every push, and measured a 1.8% rot rate on a comparable number of repositories. The presence of that file is the best single predictor of whether a list is maintained, and it is absent here. Our review of the Raspberry Pi list covers that mechanism.

How to use a security list responsibly

The dead links are the least of it. The real hazard with a curated security list is treating a mention as an endorsement, so here is the process worth applying to anything you pull from it.

Check the last commit before you install. Thirty seconds, and it filters most of the risk. An unmaintained security tool is worse than no tool, because it creates confidence without protection.

Check for advisories against the tool itself. Security software is software. Scanners, honeypots and proxies have had their own vulnerabilities, and a tool that sits in your traffic path is a target.

Read what a tool actually does before running it. Several categories on a list like this — scanners, exploitation frameworks, traffic interception — are tools whose legitimate use depends entirely on having authorisation for the system you point them at. The list cannot give you that authorisation, and the fact that something appears in a public index is not permission to use it against infrastructure that is not yours. Use them on your own systems, on explicitly scoped engagements, or in deliberately built labs.

Prefer first-party documentation for anything defensive. For the things most readers actually need — keeping a password vault safe, encrypting backups, patching — the vendor documentation beats a list entry. Our reviews of Vaultwarden and Kopia both ended at the same unglamorous conclusion: the hard part is the backup and the key custody, not the tool selection.

What the list is genuinely good for

Discovery and vocabulary. Its 348 links include 19 to manning.com and a substantial reading section, plus 15 Docker Hub references for tools distributed as images — so it functions well as a map of a field rather than as a shopping list.

If you are new to a security sub-domain and do not yet know what the standard tools are called, this is a fast way to acquire the names. Once you have them, go to each project directly.

That is the honest use case for an unmaintained-but-not-abandoned index: a table of contents for a discipline, not a validated toolchain.

Where it stands

Still worth bookmarking, at 2.7% rot and nine months since the last touch, with the caveats above. MIT licensed, so a fork that adds a link-checking workflow would be a genuine contribution and a small amount of work.

The finding: 181 of 186 GitHub repositories in this list still resolve, and the five that do not are listed above — but the repository has no CI and no automated link checking, so that number will drift and nothing will catch it. Treat the list as a map of the field and verify each tool’s maintenance status yourself, which matters more for security software than for anything else you might install.