Duration: 5-day instructor-led course

Course Description

Practical Cyber Security Bootcamp is a 5-day instructor-led course designed to equip IT professionals, system administrators, and early-career security analysts with the practical skills needed to understand, detect, and respond to modern cyber threats. Through real-world examples, instructor demonstrations, and hands-on labs, participants will develop a strong foundation in network security, system hardening, threat detection, incident response, and offensive security tactics.

This course emphasizes applied learning using live environments, open-source tools, and industry best practices. Attendees will walk away with operational experience in securing systems, analyzing vulnerabilities, detecting attacks, and responding to real-world incidents.

Prerequisites

Participants should have:

• Basic understanding of operating systems (Linux/Windows)
• Familiarity with networking concepts (IP, DNS, ports, protocols)
• Comfortable using a terminal or command prompt
• Experience with IT operations or infrastructure is helpful but not required

Key Learning Objectives

By the end of this course, participants will be able to:

• Identify and mitigate common cybersecurity threats and vulnerabilities
• Analyze network traffic and detect suspicious behavior
• Harden operating systems and secure common services
• Use open-source tools to perform vulnerability assessments and forensics
• Develop an incident response plan and execute basic containment steps
• Understand the attacker’s mindset through ethical hacking exercises

Course Takeaways

• Real-world experience using cybersecurity tools and techniques
• Checklists for hardening Linux and Windows systems
• A basic incident response playbook
• Step-by-step lab guides to repeat exercises post-course
• Certificate of completion

Module 1 – Introduction to Cybersecurity & Threat Landscape

Topics Covered

• Overview of cybersecurity roles and domains
• The CIA triad: Confidentiality, Integrity, Availability
• Common threat actors and motivations
• Current threat landscape and case studies
• The MITRE ATT&CK framework

Hands-On Labs

• Lab 1: Explore MITRE ATT&CK using a real-world scenario
• Lab 2: Simulate and analyze phishing emails using a sandboxed environment

Module 2 – Network Security and Traffic Analysis

Topics Covered

• Network protocols and common attack surfaces
• Firewalls, IDS/IPS, and segmentation
• Packet capture and traffic inspection
• DNS tunneling, port scanning, and traffic obfuscation
• Detecting and interpreting anomalies

Hands-On Labs

• Lab 3: Use Wireshark to analyze live packet captures
• Lab 4: Detect suspicious traffic from a simulated malware infection
• Lab 5: Configure a basic firewall and test rule effectiveness

Module 3 – System Hardening and Endpoint Security

Topics Covered

• Common misconfigurations in Windows and Linux
• Privilege escalation techniques
• OS hardening best practices
• Antivirus and EDR tools overview
• Secure configuration management

Hands-On Labs

• Lab 6: Perform a baseline hardening of a Windows Server using CIS benchmarks
• Lab 7: Harden a Linux server and disable unnecessary services
• Lab 8: Detect privilege escalation using system logs and EDR alerts

Module 4 – Vulnerability Assessment and Exploitation

Topics Covered

• Vulnerability scanning concepts and tools (Nessus, OpenVAS)
• Interpreting CVSS scores and prioritizing remediation
• Exploitation techniques and post-exploitation tactics
• Introduction to Metasploit and basic payloads
• Defense against known exploits

Hands-On Labs

• Lab 9: Scan a target network using Nmap and OpenVAS
• Lab 10: Exploit a vulnerable web server using Metasploit
• Lab 11: Patch and verify fixes using before-and-after scanning

Module 5 – Incident Response and Final Assessment

Topics Covered

• Phases of incident response: preparation, detection, containment, eradication, recovery, lessons learned
• Building an incident response toolkit
• Log analysis and timeline reconstruction
• Reporting and documentation
• Tabletop exercise preparation

Hands-On Labs

• Lab 12: Analyze logs from a security breach and reconstruct events
• Lab 13: Contain and remediate an infected host