Cybersecurity

Cybersecurity is the practice of protecting systems, networks, and data from unauthorised access, damage, or disruption. As a field it spans a wide range of disciplines — from defensive practices like hardening systems and monitoring for intrusions, to offensive practices like penetration testing and reverse engineering, to the underlying cryptography and protocols that everything else depends on.

Broad areas within the field

• Offensive security / penetration testing — simulating attacks against systems to find weaknesses before real attackers do, using tools for password cracking, vulnerability scanning, and exploit development
• Reverse engineering — analysing compiled software or binaries to understand how they work, often to find vulnerabilities or understand malware behaviour
• Network security — protecting data in transit, securing infrastructure, and monitoring traffic for malicious activity
• Application security — finding and fixing vulnerabilities in software during and after development
• Digital forensics and incident response — investigating breaches after they occur, tracing what happened and how
• Cryptography — the mathematical foundations underpinning secure communication, password storage, and data protection

Role in this vault

This pillar note serves as the anchor for cybersecurity-related notes in this vault — covering specific tools, techniques, and hands-on work as they’re documented. Tools already in scope for hands-on exploration include password cracking (hashcat), reverse engineering (Ghidra), and dynamic instrumentation (Frida), alongside virtualised environments for safely running dedicated penetration-testing distributions.

As more specific notes are added under this pillar — individual tools, techniques, writeups, or concepts — they should link back here, so this page stays the entry point into the topic as a whole.