Kick Start your career — CyberSecurity & Free Resources
Today, we will be covering all the resources needed that help individuals with getting started in cybersecurity.
We will be looking into many educational resources available for and from the community. This is the first blog post in the educational series, I will be coming up with more blog posts covering various topics like building home labs, write-ups of various Capture-The-Flag (CTF) topics, and more content.
Check out the CTF resources from my previous blog — https://5kasturi.medium.com/capture-the-flag-challenges-infosec-training-2267aa1971cd
First and foremost, always try to take advantage of FREE content available on the internet and learn as much as you can before moving to paid subscriptions or spending money on expensive training.
Some of my favorite go-to resources for learning are blog posts by Black Hills Information Security, SANS, Active Counter Measures, and various news feed sources ingested into my news feed app — Feedly. I always spend a few minutes every day to stay up-to-date with the latest cybersecurity news.
Kickstart your Cyber Career
SANS has many resources available to the community for free — starting with five simple ways to get started in an infosec blogpost. SANS has many blogposts covering the core skills required for breaking into the cybersecurity field. John’s Strands 5-year career path is a great guide that covers a lot of information in depth. We will see other training provided by John for getting started in Security.
It is always good to have a small home lab setup to play with things and gain hands-on experience. The video by John and his team had great information on how to build a home lab with free tools available with minimal hardware. Always try to learn the basics of Windows and Linux, and Google is your best friend to achieve this. There are a lot of free conferences and training available, so try to take advantage of the Free SANS conferences, Anisyphontraining’s Pay-What-You-Can (PWYC) courses.
Try to join communities via Linkedin, and follow people on Twitter where you can connect with other professionals in the industry to network and learn new things. Lastly, training and certifications; although SANS training is expensive, there are other industry-standard certifications that you can take.
Simply Cyber by Gerald Auger had an awesome curated free cyber resources list. This list covers many FREE CYBER resources available — starting with training, books, college courses, podcasts, News, YouTube channels, professional networking, etc..,⃣
- SANS 5️⃣ Steps to Start your career in Cyber Security by SANS — https://www.sans.org/blog/top-5-steps-to-immerse-yourself-into-the-cybersecurity-field/
- John’s 5️⃣ Year Plan into Infosec — https://www.blackhillsinfosec.com/webcast-5-year-plan-infosec/
- 🖥️ Building Home Lab — https://www.blackhillsinfosec.com/webcast-how-to-build-a-home-lab/
- SANS 🆓Tools — https://www.sans.org/img/free-faculty-tools.pdf?msc=sans-free-lp
- Simply Cyber — https://www.simplycyber.io/free-cyber-resources
Career Paths
The Cybersecurity Career Roadmap by HackerSploit and Cybersecurity Career Roadmap by Cyber Insecurity covers the career paths/jobs in the industry. The below links provide great details.
- Cybersecurity Career Roadmap by HackerSploit— https://youtu.be/HJsYohAup_Y
- SANS Roadmap by Cyber Insecurity — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WnZXOTBPYiw&ab_channel=CyberInsecurity
- SANS Training Roadmap — https://www.sans.org/media/SANS_Roadmap.pdf
- Antisyphon Training by Black Hills Information Security — https://www.antisyphontraining.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/Training-Adventure-102021PDF.pdf
Blue Team
John Hubbard’s 12 days of defense is an excellent playlist to check out to learn the basics of SOC analyst jobs and what to expect. As we discussed at the beginning of this blogpost, SANS YouTube channels have recordings of previous conferences and webcasts.
From Active Counter Measures, Chris provides excellent training content, one of the best Threat hunting level — 1 class available for free to the community. Also, make sure to check out the blogs by Active Countermeasures.
Next, we will look into some free and paid training from BHIS. From Black Hills Information Security, navigate to training and check out the career road map by Antisyphon training.
Antisyphon training shows the breakdown of courses via their career roadmap. Antisyphon offers to pay what you can courses that one can attend by spending as little as 25$ per class to the total price of the course. All the entry-level courses are great ones to get started in the industry and cover many basics and skills that one should have.
- Antisyphon Training — https://www.antisyphontraining.com/
- 🔍 Active Counter Measures Threat Hunting Course- https://www.activecountermeasures.com/cyber-threat-hunting-training-course/
- 1️⃣2️⃣ Days of Defense — https://www.youtube.com/c/SecHubb/playlists
Red team / Pentesting Jobs
The Cyber Mentor, Defcon, and John Hammond youtube channels have a lot of information covering the industry’s pen-testing side. Next, some YouTube channels are some of the great channels to follow that cover a wide variety of topics: Neal Bridges — Cyber Insecurity, David Bomball, Network Chuck, and Simply Cyber.
Last but not least do not forget to check out the upcoming free conferences — https://youtu.be/7x-s4JvpOJE
🎥 YouTube Channels
- Cyber Insecurity — https://www.youtube.com/c/CyberInsecurity
- David Bombal — https://www.youtube.com/c/DavidBombal/featured
- DEFCON — https://www.youtube.com/user/DEFCONConference/featured
- HackerSploit — https://www.youtube.com/c/HackerSploit
- John Hammond — https://www.youtube.com/c/JohnHammond010
- NetworkChuck — https://www.youtube.com/c/NetworkChuck
- Simply Cyber — https://www.youtube.com/c/GeraldAuger
- The Cyber Mentor — https://www.youtube.com/c/TheCyberMentor
- SANS Offensive Operationshttps://www.youtube.com/c/SANSOffensiveOperations
- SANS DFIR — https://www.youtube.com/c/SANSDigitalForensics
- SANS Cyber Defense — https://www.youtube.com/c/SANSBlueTeamOps
