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Cybersecurity
Knowledge Base

A curated atlas of 278 notes across 17 branches — organized by learning phase, from foundational substrate to specialty operations. Each note is atomic, with attacker/defender duality, references, and links to playbooks that turn it into action.

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278

Notes

17

Branches

16

Playbooks

17

Registries

The learning path

Read it in order. Each phase is the prerequisite for the next.

Start at 00 · Orientation for the vocabulary. Walk through Substrate → Paired → Operator → Specialty. ★ Always-on (privacy, OPSEC) threads through everything.

Open the Start Here guide

1 branch · 8 notes

How things work

3 branches · 65 notes

Offense ↔ Defense

2 branches · 33 notes

4 branches · 48 notes

6 branches · 67 notes

1 branch · 33 notes

00

Phase 00 · Start here

Orientation

Mental models, the CIA triad, and threat modeling — the language you'll use everywhere else.

1 branch · 8 notes

Foundations

Phase 0 mental models — what cybersecurity is, the CIA triad as a decision tool, threat-modeling quickstart, and the attacker-defender duality.

01

Phase 01 · How things work

Substrate

Networking, cryptography, browser trust, OS behavior. The substrate that every attack and defense touches.

3 branches · 65 notes

Cryptography

Hashes, encryption, signatures, key exchange, TLS/PKI, password storage, and token correctness.

Networking

Reachability, HTTP, proxies, DNS, TLS, and packet-level observation.

Web Security

Browser behavior, sessions, access control, and server-side exploit patterns.

02

Phase 02 · Offense ↔ Defense

Paired

Attack and detection as paired thinking. Every offensive primitive has a defensive signature; learn them together.

2 branches · 33 notes

Offensive Security / Recon

Discovery, validation, and handoff from recon into concrete testing.

Detection Engineering

Telemetry, behavioral analytics, correlation, and detection tradeoffs.

03

Phase 03 · Hands-on

Operator

Recon, exposure mapping, privilege escalation, and the practical workflows of an offensive operator.

4 branches · 48 notes

Attack Surface Mapping

What is exposed, reachable, discoverable, and drifting from intended design.

OSINT

Public-source collection, evidence quality, and ethical handling of clues.

Linux Privilege Escalation

Local boundary failures, enumeration, and safe escalation hypothesis testing.

Security Playbooks

Repeatable procedures for turning concepts into practical tests.

04

Phase 04 · Go deep

Specialty

Pick what your job demands: cloud, identity, DevSecOps, wireless, binary exploitation, API security.

6 branches · 67 notes

Wireless Security

Wi-Fi frames, handshakes, rogue access points, and local-network MITM.

API Security

Authorization, token trust, inventory drift, and machine-readable abuse.

Cloud Security

IAM, metadata, storage, network boundaries, secrets, and logging controls.

DevSecOps

Secure delivery, CI/CD hardening, supply chain, secrets, and release trust.

Identity & Active Directory

Kerberos, BloodHound graph analysis, DCSync, and AD attack-path engineering across offense and defense.

Binary Exploitation

Memory corruption, stack and heap overflows, exploit mitigations, reverse engineering, and the modern exploitation arms race at the binary level.

★

Phase ★ · Cross-cutting

Always-on

Privacy, anonymity, OPSEC. Practice continuously — these aren't a phase, they're a posture.

1 branch · 33 notes

Privacy, Anonymity & OPSEC

VPN threat models, Tor, metadata leakage, compartmentalization, and OPSEC failure modes.

Featured Note

Web Security 3 min read

Cross-Site Scripting (XSS)

XSS happens when attacker-controlled input is rendered in a browser context in a way that causes the browser to interpret it as executable code instead of inert...

#cybersecurity#web-security#xss

Reference system

Reference registries

The registries keep citations normalized behind the learning branches, so atomic notes stay compact and high-signal.

Cybersecurity Reference Registry Reference Registry - Detection Engineering Reference Registry - Privacy, Anonymity & OPSEC Reference Registry — API Security Reference Registry — Attack Surface Mapping Reference Registry — Binary Exploitation Reference Registry — Cloud Security Reference Registry — Cryptography Reference Registry — DevSecOps Reference Registry — Identity and Active Directory Reference Registry — Linux Privilege Escalation Reference Registry — Networking Reference Registry — Offensive Security Reference Registry — OSINT Reference Registry — Playbooks Reference Registry — Web Security Reference Registry — Wireless Security