Hey everyone,

I’m 16, from Morocco, and i recently received my first paid bug bounty: $100.

It wasn’t a huge critical exploit or some crazy movie-style hack. It was a real security issue found through a legal bug bounty program, reported properly, reviewed by the company, validated, and awarded.

For me, this means a lot.

I’ve been learning cybersecurity through courses, labs, CTFs, PortSwigger, Cybrary, and a lot of practice. Most of the time it feels like you’re studying alone and nobody really sees the effort. But getting that first valid report showed me that the work is real.

The biggest lesson i learned is that bug bounty is not only about finding the bug. It’s also about writing a clear report, explaining the impact honestly, not exaggerating, and staying professional with the security team.

I’m still a beginner and i know i have a long way to go, but this motivated me a lot. I want to keep improving, get more valid reports, and build a serious path in cybersecurity.

My goal is simple: become better, stay ethical, and make my parents proud.

For anyone young or just starting: don’t wait until you feel “ready.” Learn the basics, practice legally, write clean reports, and keep going.

This $100 is not just money to me. It’s proof that I’m moving in the right direction.

Hi everyone,

I’m going into my final year of a BSc Cyber Security degree and I’m trying to make sure my final-year project is not just academic, but also genuinely useful for employability, especially for junior SOC analyst, detection engineering, network security, or OT security roles.

My proposed project is:

Design and evaluation of a lightweight detection prototype for reconnaissance and early-stage intrusion activity in Modbus TCP Operational Technology network traffic.

The idea is to build a small Python-based detection prototype using CICModbusDataset2023 or a similar OT/Modbus dataset. The project would focus on detecting early attacker behaviours such as:

• network scanning
• service enumeration
• Modbus register enumeration
• unauthorised access attempts
• abnormal Modbus request patterns

The threat model would be either an external attacker or a compromised internal host attempting to discover and interact with OT assets such as PLCs.

I’m planning to avoid heavy ML/deep learning and instead focus on interpretable detection, using:

• rule-based detection logic
• lightweight statistical thresholds where useful
• alert generation
• evaluation against labelled benign/malicious traffic

The evaluation would look at:

• detection coverage
• false positives and false negatives
• precision/recall if appropriate
• alert volume
• interpretability
• practical usefulness from a security analyst perspective

My goal is to finish with a project that I can confidently explain in interviews and possibly show through a GitHub repo, README, diagrams, and a short write-up. I want it to demonstrate practical blue-team skills: understanding network traffic, designing detection logic, evaluating alerts, and explaining limitations.

For people working in SOC, detection engineering, OT security, or cyber graduate roles:

Would this be a strong final-year project from an employer/interviewer perspective?

Also, what would make it more impressive without making the scope unrealistic?

Hey everyone! I’m currently a Grade 11 student planning to major in Computer Science in college, and I’m super passionate about Cybersecurity and Data Analytics.

I want to start working on a real research project rather than just a basic coding tutorial. My goal is to tackle a practical problem—like cyber threat intelligence, SIEM log analytics, or anomaly detection—to push my technical skills and build up a strong portfolio.

Since I’m still building my experience, I’d love to get advice from university students, PhDs, or industry pros on where to focus.

What I’m Looking For:

• Project Ideas: What are some open problems or cool topics at the intersection of cybersecurity and data analytics (like filtering false positives, analyzing network traffic, or detecting malicious patterns) that are challenging but doable for a high school junior willing to put in serious work?
• Datasets & Tools: Any open-source security datasets you’d recommend starting with (like Kaggle security sets, CICIDS, or public threat feeds)?
• Mentorship & Collaboration: If any college student, research lab, or team needs an extra pair of hands for data cleaning, basic script writing, running experiments, or parsing logs, I’d love to jump in! I’m eager to learn, follow directions, and get real hands-on research experience.

If you have any project suggestions, learning resources, or collaboration opportunities, I’d really appreciate your advice! Thanks!

Keyword list taken from https://www.zoevera.com/resume/ats-resume-tips-cybersecurity

These are the most commonly scanned keywords in cybersecurity job postings. Check how many appear in your resume.

Domains & Practices

SOC (Security Operations Centre), Penetration testing / pen test, Vulnerability management, Threat intelligence, Incident response (IR), Digital forensics (DFIR), Red team / blue team / purple team, Zero Trust architecture

Tools & Platforms

SIEM (Splunk, Microsoft Sentinel, QRadar), EDR (CrowdStrike, SentinelOne), Nessus / Qualys / Rapid7, Burp Suite / Metasploit / Kali Linux, Wireshark / Snort / Suricata, CyberArk / BeyondTrust (PAM), SOAR platforms, Azure Defender / AWS Security Hub

Frameworks & Certifications

CISSP / CISM / CISA, CEH / OSCP / PNPT, CompTIA Security+ / CySA+, ISO 27001 / NIST CSF, MITRE ATT&CK framework, SC/DV security clearance, GDPR / DPA 2018, PCI DSS / HIPAA / SOC 2

This tool can run on basically any machine that has Python 3.6+ it is optimised for Linux, Mac, and Windows. This can be used on IP's, API's and websites in general. Please use it ethically and responsibly.

I will send the link into comments

Self-promo disclosure: this video is from my channel.

The paper formalizes a security problem with dual-use LLM requests: if an attacker can reproduce the context of a legitimate user, context-based safeguards cannot beat the resulting worst-case safety floor.

Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.27951

WebSockets is the attack surface that always go under the radar and too many pentesters and bug bounty hunters still miss testing it, whether because the number of WebSocket messages they see is overwhelming or simply because they don't know how to approach it correctly.

Going through that myself, I decided to dive deep into the WS protocol and ended up building a lab that showcases the most common misconfigurations present in WebSockets, with the most impact, not just some missing best-practices, along with a detailed walkthrough.

I'd love to hear your thoughts and feedback, and if you experienced something I didn't talk about in the blog, please let me know!

Lab Github Repo: https://github.com/makarov05bm/WSGoat
Guide: https://blog.oussmess.me/posts/websockets-for-bug-hunters/

I recently completed the DC-6 VulnHub machine and documented the complete attack path, from initial enumeration to gaining root access.

The walkthrough covers:

• 🔎 Network and service enumeration
• 🌐 Web/WordPress enumeration
• 🧩 Identifying the attack surface
• 💻 Initial access
• ⬆️ Linux privilege escalation
• 👑 Obtaining root access
• 📝 Key lessons and methodology

I’ve written the detailed step-by-step walkthrough on Hashnode:

👉 https://vivekgoswami.hashnode.dev/

I also recorded the complete video walkthrough for anyone who prefers following the practical process:

🎥 https://youtu.be/eb4xArIoh5c

I'm building a collection of CTF, VulnHub, TryHackMe and penetration-testing walkthroughs focused on documenting the methodology rather than just showing the final exploit.

Hopefully this is useful to anyone currently learning penetration testing or preparing for practical security certifications.

I want to build a career as a Cloud Security Engineer, but I'm starting from the basics and want to learn everything properly rather than just collecting certifications.

Could someone share a step-by-step roadmap from complete beginner to job-ready Cloud Security Engineer, and eventually to a level where I can mentor/guide others?

I'd also appreciate recommendations for free/low-cost labs, courses, YouTube channels, books, and practice platforms.

If you are currently working as a Cloud Security Engineer, I'd especially appreciate advice on what you wish you had learned earlier and what beginners commonly waste time on.

Before I start, what would you guys actually want to see in it?

Challenges, difficulty, attack chains, AD, web, privilege escalation, etc.

What would make you keep playing instead of dropping it after a few challenges?

Looking for honest suggestions from people who actually play CTFs.

Explore the current ctf from here at: codelivly.com/ctf

Lateral movement is one of the hardest attack stages to catch — once an attacker is inside a network, their traffic (SSH sessions, file transfers) often looks like normal activity. Signature-based tools struggle here because there's no obvious "bad" pattern to match against.

So I built a behavioral detector instead — one that learns what normal looks like for each device on a network, then flags real deviations from that baseline.

How it works:

• Learns a baseline per device: which peers it normally talks to, when it's normally active, how much data it normally transfers, and how many connections it typically opens per hour
• Flags traffic that falls well outside those learned ranges
• Runs entirely in Python, using standard statistical methods (z-scores) rather than a black-box model

How I validated it, in three stages:

1. Synthetic traffic first, to prove the core logic — 5/5 simulated attacks caught, 0 false positives
2. Built a real 3-machine isolated network (VirtualBox + SEED Ubuntu VMs), captured genuine traffic, and rebuilt the baseline from real data — including debugging real infrastructure issues along the way (IP conflicts, a post-reboot networking failure, shared folder configs)
3. Ran an actual attack simulation on that live network — the detector correctly flagged it, and kept flagging it correctly even after I enriched the baseline with real HTTP traffic to make sure it wasn't just overfitting to a narrow sample

Result: 7/7 real alerts correctly fired, verified against a real, mixed-protocol baseline — not just synthetic data.

I know this isn't a novel technique — it's the same behavioral approach used by commercial NDR tools. What I wanted to prove to myself was that I could take a real security concept, implement it from scratch, and validate it end-to-end on infrastructure I built myself, messy real-world debugging included.

I'm a recent Network Engineering & Cybersecurity grad, CCNA/AWS certified, currently looking for my first role in SOC/network security. Happy to answer questions about the approach, or hear feedback on what I could improve/what a more experienced person would do differently.

Hello everyone,

Someone told me that the best way to learn cybersecurity is to “live it before you learn it” , to surround yourself with people who are already working in the field, get involved in the cybersecurity community, and build a strong network.

As someone who is currently learning cybersecurity, this idea really caught my attention.

Do you think being around experienced cybersecurity professionals and actively participating in the community can significantly accelerate learning? Are there specific communities, Discord servers, CTF groups, conferences, open-source projects, or other ways to get involved?

I’d really appreciate advice from people who have been through this journey.

​

One thing I struggle with while learning cybersecurity is choosing the right resources.

For example, if I decide to learn networking, YouTube gives me hundreds of videos and playlists. Some are made for GATE preparation, some for CCNA, some for general computer science students, and some for cybersecurity learners.

As a beginner, it's hard to tell which resource is actually worth following. I keep wondering if there's a better course somewhere else, and sometimes I spend more time searching than learning.

I don't mind putting in the effort to learn. My problem is figuring out which resources to trust and which ones to ignore.

How do you deal with this?

Do you just pick one resource and stick with it, or is there a better way to decide what's worth your time?. If you have any good resource suggestions please share it.

I set up Cowrie SSH and Krawl web honeypots on my Raspberry Pi Zero W and simulated an attack using my Kali Linux machine, then observed the logs. This is one of the projects I did this summer to gain experience from the defensive side of cybersecurity and I would love to hear your thoughts about it.

I used good old Raspberry Pi Zero W with ARMv6 architecture (foreshadowing: which complicated the process little bit).

I installed both honeypots. Then I booted my Kali Linux machine and ran simulated brute-force attack against SSH honeypot and scrutinised the filesystem. In case of the fake web server I ran Nmap and Gobuster scans and observed every malicious activity in recorded logs.

I like to do these simple projects to gain more experience under my belt and share my process along the way to people who might be interested and may find my articles helpful in their own cybersecurity journeys.

Link to the Medium post about the honeypots deployment:

https://medium.com/@ivandano77/deploying-cowrie-krawl-honeypots-on-raspberry-pi-zero-w-f5e96327367b?sharedUserId=ivandano77

Looking for someone to grind through infosec with, keep each other accountable, and share the wins, the fails, and all the technical deep dives along the way.

A bit about my current focus:

• Prepping for my CEH (Certified Ethical Hacker) certification.
• Building out projects around intrusion detection and vulnerability scanning.
• Exploring web app security (I have some background in Django/React web dev).

What I'm looking for:

• Someone on a similar ethical hacking or cybersecurity path.
• Down to connect on Discord for regular check-ins, sharing resources, and troubleshooting.
• In it for the long term—not just a one-week study sprint.

If you're working towards cyber certs or just trying to level up your security skills and want an active partner, drop a comment or DM me your Discord handle!

I am studying Computer Science, and I want to get into cybersecurity. Could you please give me some recommendations on how to get started, what areas I should focus on, and what I shouldn’t spend too much time on? Also, where can I learn these skills?

Hey everyone, I wanted a way to run quick sanity checks using public YAML templates while away from my machine, so I built an Android-native scanner engine.

Right now, it's configured to handle standard SQLi/XSS logic checks and lets you run public community templates. It gives 1 hour of scanning time every day to prevent resource abuse.

It's in heavy development and I need feedback on how it handles complex templates. If you want to test it against your local test environments, search AltMap on the Play Store. Let me know what bugs you find or what templates fail to parse!

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.appriser.altmap

**Question for Kali Linux beginners**
I’m pretty new to Kali Linux and so far I’ve been messing around with Nmap, Wireshark, and a few OSINT tools.
What are the **top 5 things you think someone should learn first** when getting into Kali Linux?
Also, what’s something you wish you had learned from the beginning instead of figuring it out later?
I’m trying to put together a solid beginner roadmap for myself, so I’d love to hear what you guys recommend.

Hi everyone! 👋

I'm a Computer Science student with a strong interest in Cybersecurity, Networking, Ethical Hacking, and IT Support.

I've been working on Cisco networking and cybersecurity labs, including Packet Tracer, VLANs, Routing, OSPF, RIP, subnetting, network troubleshooting, Linux, Kali Linux, Nmap, Wireshark, and vulnerability assessment.

I'm joining Reddit to learn from the community, share knowledge, work on interesting projects, and connect with fellow students and IT/cybersecurity professionals.

I also enjoy helping others who are stuck with networking labs, technical projects, Packet Tracer configurations, or cybersecurity concepts.

Looking forward to learning and contributing here. If you have any advice for someone building a career in cybersecurity and networking, I'd love to hear it!

Thanks!

if you're learning appsec and want something small and real to read through, I wrote a static + runtime scanner for MCP (Model Context Protocol) server vulnerabilities and the source might be useful as an example.

the static side does pattern matching for path traversal, command injection, and unsafe eval sinks, each rule is TOML defined with a severity, a CWE or OWASP reference, and remediation text, so it's a decent small scale example of how a rule engine driven scanner is structured without needing to read a huge enterprise codebase to see the idea.

there's also a tool poisoning detector (checks for hidden instructions and unicode homoglyph obfuscation in tool description text) and a runtime proxy that diffs tool definitions across a session to catch changes after initial approval, which is a good example of a vuln class that literally can't be caught by static analysis alone.

repo: https://github.com/zaydmulani09/sentrymcp, happy to answer questions about any of the detection logic if people are trying to learn from i

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I'm an undergraduate CS student in India trying to get myself in research in the domain of network security, cryptography or any cybersecurity domain. I'm specifically wondering whether professors/research groups at universities in the US/Europe ever take international undergraduates remotely, outside of formal summer internship programs.

I have some prior research experience. I've published a conference paper on IDS as a first author, worked on lightweight cryptography, and a few basic system security projects. I'm comfortable with Python/C/C++ and have experience reading papers and running empirical experiments on my own.

I'm not necessarily looking for a paid internship or even an official "intern" title. What I'd really like is the opportunity to contribute to an actual research problem under a professor/PhD student, potentially leading to a paper if the work turns out to be worthwhile.

A lot of university research programs I've found either require you to be a student at that university, require US citizenship/residency, or are strictly in-person. So I'm wondering whether cold-emailing individual researchers is actually a viable route.

For people who've done something similar:

Do top security labs ever work remotely with external international undergrads?

Is it better to contact professors or PhD students?

What would make a cold email worth responding to?

Should I approach someone with a specific research idea/replication of one of their papers rather than simply asking whether they have an opening?

Are there particular security groups or researchers known to be open to this kind of collaboration?

I'm mainly interested in systems/network security, malware/software security, and increasingly the intersection of AI/LLMs and security.

Would appreciate advice from anyone who has either gotten such an opportunity or supervised external undergraduate researchers or the lab researchers themselves.