Cybersecurity
Cybersecurity is protecting systems, networks, and data from threats. Not just building walls, but understanding how attacks work, detecting them when they happen, responding effectively, and hardening systems so they're harder to break next time. The work spans threat modeling, vulnerability assessment, detection engineering, incident response, and security architecture.
This track follows a purple team model: every project attacks then defends the same system. You see the same event from both sides, first as the attacker exploiting a weakness, then as the defender detecting and remediating it. This builds deeper understanding than attack-only or defense-only approaches.
The track
Projects span from basic reconnaissance and hardening to complex detection engineering and incident response. You'll direct AI to scan networks, exploit vulnerabilities, write detection rules, and build security architectures for fictional clients, then verify whether the defenses actually work, the detections actually fire, and the remediation actually closes the gap.
The skill you're building isn't memorizing CVEs or running tools by rote. It's directing AI to do security work and verifying the result: knowing what a real vulnerability looks like versus a false positive, where AI's security analysis misses context, and when automated fixes introduce new risks.
Before you start
- Read the Introduction: what the field is, how the work flows, what tools you'll use
- Complete the Platform Setup: accounts, terminal, Claude Code, Git (same for all tracks)
- Complete the Cybersecurity Setup: security tools, lab environment, and a hands-on demo