In my Nashville BSides 2022 talk, I shared some resources and ideas for sample projects. The domain specific examples are listed below. These links are all live as of April 2022. I hope this inspires you and helps you get some practical experience that you can reference as you start your new career and/or use this as a base to dig deeper.

Thanks,

-Justin

Sample InfoSec Projects

Online PGP Demo

This website allows you to create and exchange public/private keys to quickly demonstrate how PGP and similar encrypted communications work. This is a practical application as opposed to getting into the math behind it.

RSA Calculator

A quick place to do simple examples of math behind the RSA algorithm. You can use (relatively) small numbers for P and Q.

Simple Port Scanners Python, Bash, Windows command prompt

Being able to read code and make reasonable inferences into what it is doing is a useful skill. These simple port scanning programs and one-liners are a good start in understanding scripting. Its also important to note that you can do this yourself! For simple tasks you don’t need special tools.

Pivot Project (General InfoSec)

  • https://pivotproject.org - Student/Beginner Focused Cyber Security challenges. Gives you some real skills such as learning to use grep, getting started on the *nix command line, some forensic challenges.

Endpoint/Forensics

Coding/Scripting

This is a really quick hands on style of book. It is not a reference or full Python manual. It gets you up to speed quickly and the sections dealing with REST and Web APIs are extremely valuable!