All Posts in "Cybersecurity"

Beginner Ethical Hacking Projects Using Kali Linux and OWASP ZAP

Entering the field of cybersecurity requires moving from theory to application. The most effective way to build a professional-grade portfolio is by performing controlled penetration tests against intentionally vulnerable applications.

Legal and Ethical Disclaimer: All testing must occur in an isolated Virtual Machine (VM) environment. Never perform these exercises against live websites or public infrastructure. Recommended targets for these projects include OWASP Juice Shop, DVWA (Damn Vulnerable Web Application), or isolated containers on VulnHub.

Project 1: Automated Web Application Vulnerability Scanning

The objective is to master the automated reconnaissance phase of a penetration test. OWASP ZAP (Zed Attack Proxy) is an industry-standard tool that acts as a “man-in-the-middle,” sitting between your browser and the target application to intercept and analyze traffic.

Workflow:

  1. Configure the Proxy: In Kali Linux, open ZAP. Go to Tools Options Network Local Servers/Proxies and set it to listen on 127.0.0.1:8080. Configure your browser
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Betty Gray by — May 12, 2026 in Cybersecurity
Advanced Machine Learning Projects for Cybersecurity Network Anomaly Detection

Traditional Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) rely on signature-based matching to catch threats. While highly effective for known indicators of compromise (IoCs), this methodology fails completely when encountering zero-day exploits, advanced persistent threats (APTs), or polymorphic malware payloads.

To secure modern infrastructure, enterprise security architectures are shifting toward automated behavioral network anomaly detection. Moving past outdated, clean academic datasets like KDD Cup 99, production Network Detection and Response (NDR) systems process real-world data formats—such as Zeek/Corelight connection logs, or raw PCAP streams converted into NetFlow v9 or IPFIX formats—to detect malicious actors through structural communication anomalies.

The High-Velocity Feature Extraction Pipeline

The primary engineering bottleneck in network data science is converting unstructured, high-velocity network packets into ML-ready matrices without introducing packet drops on high-throughput pipes.

[ Raw Network Tap / PCAP ] ──► [ Zeek Parsing Engine ] ──► [ Feature Extraction Layer ] ──► [ Streaming Vector Matrix … Read More

Betty Gray by — April 15, 2026 in Cybersecurity
How to Build a Cybersecurity Home Lab Using Wazuh SIEM for Threat Detection

Building a cybersecurity home lab is the single most effective way to break into the security field and gain hands-on experience. It allows you to step away from theoretical textbooks and directly experience live telemetry, log aggregation, and adversarial tactics.

At the center of any modern Security Operations Center (SOC) is a Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) system. For a home lab, Wazuh is an exceptional choice. Wazuh is a powerful, open-source enterprise SIEM and Extended Detection and Response (XDR) platform that combines log management, vulnerability assessment, configuration assessment, and file integrity monitoring (FIM) into a single, intuitive interface.

Architectural Blueprint & Prerequisites

Before deploying software, you need to establish a stable hypervisor platform to host your virtual machines (VMs). Excellent options include Proxmox VE, VMware Workstation, or Type-2 hypervisors like VirtualBox.

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│  ┌─────────────────┐             ┌──────────────────┐  │… Read More

Betty Gray by — March 27, 2026 in Cybersecurity