Resources to help build your cyber security skills
We’re moving! Come and find us on www.cyberstart.com/blog where you will find even more tips, tricks and industry support. See you there!
Our security team has some great resources that you can use to advance your knowledge and get into the industry. Whether you want to practise with more online resources, to look at some potential courses and extra tutorials or go old-school and read into the industry, we have made a list of resources for you to use to increase your skills:
Practice resources:
- CyberStart Go
A sampler set of challenges from the CyberStart Team
https://go.joincyberstart.com - Hack this Site
A website where you can practice basic web exploitation techniques.
https://hackthissite.org - Over the wire
A website with a large variety of challenges, including highly-advanced binary exploitation attacks
https://overthewire.org - Smash the stack
Website that focuses mainly on binary exploitation
http://smashthestack.org - Hack the box
a website that exposes lots of vulnerable VM’s for you to fingerprint and exploit services on.
https://hackthebox.eu - Vulnhub
A place for downloading a selection of vulnerable VM’s for you to practise on.
https://www.vulnhub.com - The offensive security, incident response, and internet security lab
A student-run cybersecurity research lab located in RH219 at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering. It is a part of the university’s Center for Cyber Security.
https://www.osiris.cyber.nyu.edu/getting-involved
Online security resources:
- Cybrary
A library of free cyber security courses.
https://www.cybrary.it/ - Udacity
This huge collection of free, self-paced courses covers subjects from cryptography to artificial intelligence and more.
https://eu.udacity.com/courses/all - MIT course material
Not one, but two free course materials! The first is about Computer Systems Security, the second on Network and Computer Security. Both are from 2014.
https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-computer-science/6-858-computer-systems-security-fall-2014
https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-computer-science/6-857-network-and-computer-security-spring-2014/ - PicoCTF (Carnegie Mellon)
Challenges from the 2018 event are still open for practice
https://picoctf.com - Mprat’s Terminus
An online game to learn Linux terminal commands. Loosely based on the old ‘Zork’ game, the student has to use Linux commands in a terminal interface to find their way through an adventure land.
http://www.mprat.org/Terminus/
Programming resources:
- CodeWars
Online programming challenges in a variety of languages.
https://www.codewars.com/ - Code academy
Programming tutorials in a variety of languages that can be done in the browser.
https://www.codecademy.com/ - Github programming books
A massive collection of free ebooks covering essentially all areas of programming and more.
https://github.com/EbookFoundation/free-programming-books/blob/master/free-programming-books.md - CyberAces tutorials
Narrated video lessons on 3 topics: Operating Systems, Networking and System Administrations. These topics are hard to find materials on and the tutorials are delivered in a short, easy to understand format.
https://tutorials.cyberaces.org/tutorials - Mitre cyber academy
Video links to infosec topics (similar to Khan Academy) and challenges from previous MITRE CTF events.
http://mitrecyberacademy.org/
Reading resources:
- Silence on the Wire: A Field Guide to Passive Reconnaissance and Indirect Attacks by Michal Zalewski
- Hacking: The Art of Exploitation by Jon Erickson
- The Shellcoder’s Handbook by Chris Anley
- Red Team Field Manual by Ben Clark
- Windows Forensics by Dr. Philip Polstra
- Malware Analyst’s Cookbook and DVD: Tools and Techniques for Fighting Malicious Code by Michael Ligh, Blake Hartstein, Steven Adair & Matthew Richard
- The Code Book by Simon Singh
- Breaking into Information Security: Learning the Ropes 101 by Andy Gill
- Grey Hat Hacking by Stephen Sims, Allen Harper, Daniel Regalado, Ryan Linn, Branko Spasojevic, Linda Martinez, Michael Baucom, Chris Eagle and Shon Harris
- Ghost in the Wires by Kevin Mitnick and William L. Simon
- JavaScript: The Good Parts by Douglas Crockford
- XSS Cheat Sheet by Rodolfo Assis (this is actually a PDF)
Build your cyber security skills through our challenges and puzzles and move into an industry which needs you. Sign up to register your interest for next year, now.
Interested in our programmes? Check out where you can build your cyber security knowledge for free!
UK 13–18-year-old student programme: Cyber Discovery https://cyberdisc.io/medium
USA 13–18-year-old girls student programme: Girls Go CyberStart https://ggcs.online/medium
USA 18–year-old and above college student programme: Cyber FastTrack https://cyberft.io/medium
