Cybersecurity Engineer

SOC Analyst: Monitor security alerts, triage incidents, investigate threats in real-time

Penetration Tester: Simulate attacks on systems to identify and report vulnerabilities

Blue Team: Implement defensive controls, harden systems, respond to incidents

Threat Hunter: Proactively search for undetected threats in logs and network traffic

Vulnerability management: scan, prioritize, track, and remediate CVEs across infrastructure

Write incident reports, compliance documentation, and security runbooks

Build and tune detection rules in SIEM tools (Splunk, Elastic SIEM, Sentinel)

Networking: TCP/IP, DNS, HTTP/S, TLS — deep understanding is non-negotiable

Linux + Windows administration: file systems, registry, processes, event logs

SIEM: Splunk, Elastic SIEM, or Microsoft Sentinel — query languages (SPL, KQL)

Offensive tools: Metasploit, Burp Suite, Nmap, Nessus, SQLmap

Scripting: Python for automation; Bash for Linux-based tasks

OWASP Top 10: all 10 web vulnerabilities in depth

Malware analysis basics: static analysis and dynamic analysis

CIA Triad: Confidentiality, Integrity, Availability — must appear in every security explanation

MITRE ATT&CK framework: essential vocabulary for all SOC and blue team roles

PKI: certificates, certificate authorities, chain of trust, TLS handshake mechanics

OWASP vulnerabilities: SQLi, XSS, CSRF, SSRF, path traversal, IDOR, broken auth

Incident response phases: Preparation, Identification, Containment, Eradication, Recovery, Lessons Learned