Cyber Security

Understand what organisations protect, how attacks create risk and how security controls reduce exposure.

• Confidentiality, integrity and availability; assets, threats, vulnerabilities and risk.
• Common attack types, social engineering and the role of people, processes and technology.
• Preventive, detective and corrective controls; defence in depth and least privilege.
• Security roles, policies, authorised testing scope and evidence handling.

Practical exerciseCreate an asset inventory and risk register for a sample organisation, then recommend suitable controls.

Build the networking knowledge needed to understand traffic, exposure and protective boundaries.

• TCP/IP, IP addressing, ports, protocols, DNS, HTTP and TLS fundamentals.
• Network segmentation, firewalls, VPNs and secure remote access.
• Reading packet captures and distinguishing normal traffic from suspicious patterns.
• Intrusion detection and prevention concepts, rules and common false positives.

Practical exerciseReview a sample network diagram and packet capture; propose firewall rules with a business reason for each.

Explore how operating-system configuration affects the security of users, services and data.

• Accounts, groups, file permissions, processes and services in Windows and Linux.
• System hardening, patch management and secure configuration baselines.
• Endpoint protection, malware indicators and endpoint detection and response concepts.
• System and authentication logs; backup and recovery checks.

Practical exerciseComplete a hardening checklist and investigate a simulated suspicious login using supplied endpoint logs.

Learn a structured approach to identifying and reporting weaknesses in an authorised lab.

• Written authorisation, scope, rules of engagement and test-environment boundaries.
• Asset discovery, vulnerability scanning and manual validation of findings.
• Web security concepts: access control failures, injection and insecure configuration.
• Severity, business impact, remediation recommendations and retesting.

Practical exerciseAssess a deliberately vulnerable training application and write a finding with evidence and remediation steps.

Connect identity controls with protection of sensitive information across local and cloud systems.

• Authentication, authorisation, MFA, SSO and privileged access fundamentals.
• Data classification, encryption at rest and in transit, and key-management concepts.
• Cloud shared responsibility, storage permissions and secure workload configuration.
• Secrets handling, backup protection and data-loss prevention concepts.

Practical exerciseReview a sample cloud configuration and recommend changes to permissions, storage exposure and secret handling.

Follow the work of a security operations team from raw events to a documented investigation.

• Log sources, central collection, normalisation and SIEM concepts.
• Indicators of compromise, alert severity, correlation and investigation timelines.
• Phishing triage and threat-intelligence context without treating every indicator as proof.
• Detection tuning, false-positive analysis and escalation notes.

Practical exerciseCorrelate sample email, sign-in and endpoint events to explain a suspicious activity timeline.

Practise deciding what to do when a potential incident is reported.

• Preparation, identification, triage, containment, eradication and recovery.
• Preserving evidence, recording actions and escalating to the right owners.
• Incident communication, service restoration and recovery validation.
• Root-cause analysis, lessons learned and control improvements.

Practical exerciseRun a tabletop response to a simulated compromised account and produce an incident report and recovery checklist.

Combine assessment, monitoring and response skills into a project you can explain clearly.

• Scope a security review for a sample organisation and document assumptions.
• Prepare an architecture diagram, risk register, findings and remediation priorities.
• Present investigation evidence and explain the limits of your conclusions.
• Practise SOC, security analyst and support interview scenarios using your project.

Practical exercisePresent a security assessment and incident-response portfolio with a prioritised improvement plan.