5 cybersecurity platforms which helped me land a SOC job

The backstory behind this post is the awful number of posts I see on LinkedIn about the 10-50 best platforms to learn cybersecurity. When I was a newbie and just started learning cyber and looking at Youtube videos these lists overloaded my brain, it was overwhelming and in the end, I didn’t know where to start and what to do.

My first piece of advice to everybody who wants to work in this amazing field is to get a mentor. It’s a huge field with a lot of positions and responsibilities, knowing where you can go and in what are you interested is a crucial part of choosing a platform.

The second piece of advice, make a plan and stick with it. Even if you change your mind in the middle, hang in there, go forward, get the cert and never look back. But never start something and leave it, this is the worst habit we can develop.

After this long intro, let’s see the platform I used to nail a job in the field of cybersecurity!

5. INE

I did various courses at INE, the EJPT (eLearnSecurity Junior Penetration Tester), the EWPT (eLearnSecurity Web application Penetration Tester), and ICCA (INE Certified Cloud Associate) and they are amazing if you want to have in-depth knowledge. I recommend them to everybody who wants to gain deep knowledge of topics, like cloud, cybersecurity or networking. They have well-structured courses with videos and labs, you can see your progress in a bar and they like to go into the details of the topics.

On the other hand, I heard many stories from some of the ex-students that they bought the exams and when their machines couldn’t spawn to complete the exam or they lost the price of an exam because of technical issues. Upon contacting the support, they have been told that no refund, that’s all, adios!

Also, most of the courses are slides…Hundreds of slides….if you sit down to learn, for hours you are gonna read slides. It doesn’t sound bad, but after 100-200 slides you end up pretty frustrated. Also, you cant copy the material to make notes or execute code on your machine.

With fewer slides, more videos and labs and with better customer service they could be in an upper rank. Moreover to have access to all their courses you have to pay an annual subscription which is 750 $…I think that’s a lot and as a business model it surely works but a monthly subscription with access to every one of their courses could open up more doors to this industry.

4. Let’s defend.io

Letsdefend.io represents the everyday work of a SOC analyst in an educative and fun way. It covers everything from EDR to SIEM usage, network and file analysis. You have to be careful as well, there is malicious traffic from machines which are doing pentest. You have to think a lot before, while and after solutioning an incident as in real life.

The platform has various paths, and badges, you can see your progress here as well and it’s well structured. You can put your newly gained knowledge into practice after completing a lesson. It hasn’t got videos, but the material for one topic is not as much as in the case of INE.

It’s free, there is a subscribe option which I didn’t know existed. The creators of this site put their heart into this project and when learning and using it you can feel it. Every exercise, incident and topic is from somebody who wanted to give something to the newcomers in the industry. I highly recommend it to everybody who wants to have an insight into the daily life of a SOC analyst.

3. YouTube

BuT VaLeNtIn YoUtUbE iS NoT a cYbEr PlAtForm!Yes and no, youtube is a streaming service which offers content. If you have to fix something, debug a program or find a quick solution you ask google or youtube. The same applies when you want to start to work in Cybersecurity, you type how to get a job, which skills you need…etc.

Use this platform and the awesome content creators to understand better the topics. I could understand a lot of concepts and theories from Youtube better than my professors. Here I leave the best YouTube channels for learning Cyber.

Linus Tech Tips: Everything computer related, you can find here from professionals in a fun and educative way. Want to see a server, a database, or how the Linux kernel works, you will find it here.

Computerphile: Everything I know about cryptography, blockchain and computing is thanks to them. Have you thought about how an SQL injection works from the view of the server? Well, look up their channel and you will find the answer.

John Hammond: We can’t leave John out of this list, he creates content about anything cyber-related every week.From hacking machines, new attack techniques, malware analysis and many more. If you will follow just one of these channels then that should be John’s!

2. TCM Security

When somebody asks me which is my favourite platform for learning cybersecurity, without hesitation I say TCM Security. It’s just good, it has everything, video lessons, and hands-on labs, and you are applying the new knowledge WHILE learning the theory not after.

It doesn’t have slides, like INE, it’s fun you can see your progress. The mentors on this platform are all awesome. For a price of 36 bucks, you will have access to all their courses, which I see reasonable.

I did 4 courses on this platform, but I want to do all of them. This is the new way of educating people, not just opening a book and making some notes or putting together some slides and going on. Whether you are interested in pentesting, Linux, or programming, you will find a course which fits best for you.

When there is a programming exercise they give you a code in text format, so you don’t have to type everything you saw. they have subtitles so if you are not a native English speaker but you can read well in English then you can perfectly understand everything.

If you follow their twitch or Discord, sometimes they give out courses for free or for 5 bucks. They have amazing support and customer service…I just can’t say bad things about them.10/10, go and try their courses!^^

1. TryHackMe

For me the winner is this platform, I have been using TryHackMe for 3 years and I can’t say anything bad about it. It’s free if you want to have a machine in your browser then it is 10 bucks. This platform has the best-structured material. They have rooms, every room contains several lessons, and at the end of every lesson, there are questions about the given lesson. Usually, they give you a virtual machine to apply and play around with your newly acquired knowledge.

They have paths for pentesters, SOC Analysts, and challenges, you can form a team to hack with friends and see each other’s progress. If you got stuck the community has made a ton of writeups and walkthroughs.

This platform is the future of education, where you always want to come back just to do one more room. Education should be fun and entertaining and the THM team achieved this. I hope that we will see other platforms in the future rising and giving this quality of content for a reasonable price.

If you have never tried it, give it a go, it’s free and you can’t lose anything but gain a ton of hands-on experience and knowledge.

Thanks for reading, I hope you enjoyed this post. Check out my other posts and if you are interested in my work follow my LinkedIn page:

https://www.linkedin.com/company/83026465

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All of the used images are from the mentioned websites, all of them belong to their respective owners and have been used for educational purposes! Don’t sue me pls:(

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