SOC Analysts – Hands-On Projects & Playbooks

If you’re trying to move from “I know the theory” to “I can actually work a SOC shift”, this guide is built for you. It’s a practical SOC Analyst workbook packed with lab-style exercises, real alert scenarios, and workflows you can reuse on the job.

🔹 SOC Fundamentals in Practice
- Roles (L1/L2), shift models, escalation paths
- How alerts move through the triage → investigation → containment pipeline

🔹 SIEM & Log Analysis Labs
- Building basic correlation rules
- Investigating Windows / Linux auth logs, firewall logs, proxy/DNS telemetry
- Pivoting from indicators (IP, hash, domain) into full incident timelines

🔹 Alert Triage & Incident Handling
- Step-by-step playbooks for phishing, malware, brute-force, web attacks
- False-positive reduction and enrichment with OSINT & TI feeds

🔹 Threat Hunting & Use Cases
- Hypothesis-based hunts (lateral movement, persistence, data exfil)
- Example queries you can adapt for Splunk, Elastic, Sentinel, QRadar, etc.

🔹 Reporting & Documentation
- Sample incident tickets, shift handover notes, and management-ready summaries

Windows & PowerShell Commands — Essential Guide for Cybersecurity Professionals, Okan YILDIZ, 2025

🔹 Core Windows CLI for Security Operations
– Event log inspection (wevutil, eventvwr, Get-WinEvent)
– User/session visibility & live investigation commands
– Process, service, and network analysis essentials
– File system auditing & permission review techniques

🔹 PowerShell for DFIR & Threat Hunting
– Deep system enumeration (Get-Process, Get-Service, Get-LocalUser, CIM/WMI queries)
– Network reconnaissance & live traffic monitoring
– Registry interrogation for persistence & malware indicators
– Collecting artifacts for IR workflows

🔹 Active Directory & Identity Insights
– AD object queries & user/group enumeration
– Privilege escalation visibility
– Sessions, logons, access rights & trust relationship checks

🔹 Incident Response Foundations
– Quick triage commands
– Host compromise validation
– Lateral movement indicators
– Privileged access and credential abuse checks

🔹 Red Team & Blue Team Utility Commands
– Recon & enumeration shortcuts
– Script execution policies
– Command-line defense evasion insights (for defenders to detect)

#windows #audit #coding

JWT Security – Complete Enterprise Implementation for Modern Apps 🛡

🔐 JWT Architecture & Design
• Header, payload, signature internals
• Secure use of alg, kid, and claim design
• Stateless vs session-based auth from a security lens

💣 Real-World Vulnerabilities
• Algorithm confusion (none, RS256→HS256) with full exploit + fix
• Key management pitfalls (weak secrets, kid path-traversal, JWKS abuse)
• Token storage risks (localStorage, extensions, XSS, supply-chain issues)

🧬 Secure Implementation Blueprint
• End-to-end JWT lifecycle: auth → issuance → storage → usage → refresh → revocation
• Device binding, replay detection, anomaly detection & rate limiting
• Production-ready JWT service with Redis, logging, metrics & audit trails

🛠 Code You Can Drop Into Your Stack
• Python & Node-style examples
• Secure header/payload builders
• Signature verification pipelines with strict algorithm whitelisting
• Key rotation strategy with kid and overlapping keys

#AppSec

Deep-Dive Drop: Dev(sec)Ops Process for Dummies 🐜⚙️

Most teams ship code to production in minutes… and trust a few YAML lines not to burn the house down

In this guide, I break down how one missing security gate in a CI/CD pipeline led to a 47-minute attack and $4M+ in damage—and how to redesign your processes so it never happens again.

🔍 The 3:47 AM Incident
• Step-by-step timeline from alert → triage → forensics → root cause
• How a “hotfix” branch, skipped scans, and an expired token led to full domain compromise

🏗 Secure vs Insecure DevOps Patterns
• Manual approval gates, shared service accounts, static tokens, no baselines
• Secure alternatives: immutable workflows, environment-specific gates, anomaly detection, auto-rollback, ephemeral creds

🧩 8 Core Processes Across the SDLC
• Vulnerability scanning (SAST/SCA/DAST/Cloud/IaC)
• CI/CD pipeline security and workflow hardening
• Infrastructure change management (Terraform / K8s / cloud)
• Container security & image signing
• Dynamic secret rotation and short-lived credentials
• Incident response flow, KPIs, and RACI for each process

📊 Real KPIs, Not Theory
• MTTR for critical vulns, deployment & rollback SLAs
• Secret age, rotation success rate, baseline vs anomaly metrics
• Velocity-first vs security-first cost curves over time

#SecDevOps

💻 Linux Server Configuration The Hidden Skill That Separates Junior Engineers from Real Engineers

In cybersecurity and DevSecOps, people talk a lot about cloud, AI, orchestration, Kubernetes… But very few talk about the backbone behind every secure infrastructure: 👉 Linux system administration.

This guide covers fundamentals that every modern engineer should master:
🔹 bash fundamentals
🔹 filesystem management (mount/umount, fstab)
🔹 file permissions (chmod, chown, sticky bits, setgid)
🔹 system processes (ps, top, pstree, signals)
🔹 package management (apt, rpm, bin installers)
🔹 NFS, Samba, DNS, DHCP, FTP
🔹 Apache2, MySQL, Postfix
🔹 Archiving & compression (tar, gzip, bzip2)

Whether you're a penetration tester, DevOps engineer, security architect, or backend developer Linux is your operating theater. If you don’t understand it deeply, you can’t secure it deeply.

#linux