The index of our security fundamentals and operations series: what to learn first, how the topics depend on each other, a practice plan with legal labs you can run yourself, and links to every part from the CIA triad to zero trust.
Part 7 of the security fundamentals series. Firewalls, intrusion detection and prevention, VPNs and forward and reverse proxies compared by what they can see, what they can stop, where they sit, and the misconfigurations we find most often.
Part 6 of the security fundamentals series. Authentication versus authorization, the MFA factors and which ones resist phishing, and the four access control models with code-level examples, least privilege and access reviews.
A security review of a legacy customer portal found the password column was only Base64-encoded. Here is how we confirmed it, why encoding is not encryption, and how we moved 180,000 accounts to Argon2id with rehash-on-login and a targeted reset.
Part 5 of the security fundamentals series. Encoding, encryption, hashing, MACs and digital signatures compared by purpose and reversibility, symmetric versus asymmetric keys, and how TLS combines them all in one connection.
Part 4 of the security fundamentals series. Malware families, phishing, denial of service, man-in-the-middle and injection explained by the signs you would notice and the controls that stop them, without any attack instructions.
Part 3 of the security fundamentals series. Threat, vulnerability, exploit, impact and risk defined with one running example, why a CVSS score is not your risk, and a small risk register you can start this week.
Part 2 of the security fundamentals series. The networking concepts you need to reason about exposure: IP and MAC addresses, ports, TCP versus UDP, common services, and how to see what your own hosts are listening on.
Part 1 of the security fundamentals series. What cybersecurity actually covers, how it differs from information security, and how confidentiality, integrity and availability map to the code and systems you build every day.