Cybersecurity Professional

Build the foundation that every security practitioner shares. Over eight AI-led teaching lessons and three hands-on labs, you will learn the vocabulary and mental models the rest of the Cybersecurity Professional skill path depends on: the modern threat landscape and the actors who populate it, the CIA triad and AAA model, risk-management thinking, defense in depth with the MITRE ATT&CK framework, essential networking and operating-system knowledge for security work, cryptographic primitives, and the NIST Cybersecurity Framework. By the end of this course you will be able to describe the modern threat landscape, reason about risk in business terms, read a security control taxonomy, navigate the MITRE ATT&CK Navigator, use OpenSSL to inspect cryptographic artifacts, and self-assess an organization against the NIST Cybersecurity Framework.

Build the identity vocabulary every modern security practitioner shares. Over eight AI-led teaching lessons and five hands-on labs including read-only audit labs on a real Entra P2 tenant you will learn authentication factors and the modern phishing-resistant MFA ladder, federation protocols (SAML, OAuth 2.0, OIDC), authorization models (ACL, RBAC, ABAC, PBAC, ReBAC), the Zero Trust architecture that replaced perimeter trust, privileged-access-management via PIM, and the full identity-governance lifecycle. By the end you will be able to decode a SAML assertion and an OIDC id_token by hand, audit a Conditional Access configuration, read a PIM eligibility set, and triage Identity Protection risk events the way a real IAM analyst does.

Learn how a modern Security Operations Center actually works, from the alert that arrives at 2 AM to the triage decisions that keep business running. You will understand the SIEM data pipeline from log collection through correlation rules, use MITRE ATT&CK as your daily reference for naming adversary behavior, write and tune Elasticsearch detection rules against real log data, author KQL queries for threat hunting, work through a L1 triage scenario role-play, and finish with a full-day capstone running the SOC workflow end to end.

Learn how to run an incident response from first-minute detection through forensic root cause analysis and executive after-action reporting. By the end you will understand the PICERL lifecycle (Preparation, Identification, Containment, Eradication, Recovery, Lessons Learned), use Volatility for memory forensics and Autopsy for disk forensics against real captures, reconstruct an attack timeline from logs, and run a ransomware tabletop followed by a full end-to-end IR capstone against Beacon Harbor Financial.

Learn how to prioritize vulnerability remediation using CVSS + EPSS + asset criticality (not just severity score) and how to run hypothesis-driven threat hunting that finds attacker activity the automated detections missed. By the end you will triage a vulnerability scan, build 3 hunting queries from threat intelligence hypotheses, and understand how to measure a hunt program's maturity.

Learn the offensive security mindset how attackers think, recon targets, exploit vulnerabilities, and move laterally. Course covers the full pentest lifecycle (Rules of Engagement recon exploitation post-exploitation reporting) with hands-on CTF challenges against intentionally-vulnerable systems. By the end you can run a basic pentest, communicate findings to defenders, and understand why offensive knowledge makes you a better defender.

Learn how security integrates with the software development lifecycle (SDL): security requirements, threat modeling with STRIDE, static + dynamic + composition analysis, and secure coding practices. Hands-on labs use a Node.js security-focused container to fix real vulnerabilities. By the end you can threat-model a service, read SAST results effectively, and refactor vulnerable code into secure code.

Learn the governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) discipline that frames every security program at scale. Covers NIST CSF, ISO 27001, SOC 2, policy writing, audit preparation, and executive security reporting. By the end you understand how security programs are structured, measured, and communicated to boards + auditors + regulators.