penetration testing
hands-on penetration testing and security research. started out of curiosity — wanting to understand how systems actually break, not just how they're built.
the toolkit grew over time. kali linux as the base. nmap for network scanning and enumeration — figuring out what's running, what's exposed, what shouldn't be. burp suite for intercepting and poking at web traffic. metasploit when i needed to go deeper and actually demonstrate an exploit.
most of the learning happened on hackthebox and tryhackme. retired boxes, guided rooms, then eventually live challenges. each one teaches you something different — sometimes it's a misconfigured service, sometimes it's a forgotten credential, sometimes it's an injection you wouldn't have thought to try.
i set up a home lab for testing. a few virtual machines running vulnerable-by-design applications — dvwa, metasploitable, juice shop. this made it possible to practice without worrying about breaking anything real, and to repeat attacks until the methodology stuck.
spent a lot of time with the owasp top 10. sql injection, xss, broken authentication, security misconfigurations. the theory is one thing, but actually finding and exploiting these in a controlled environment is where the understanding really forms.
web application security testing became a particular focus. mapping out an application, identifying input points, testing for common vulnerabilities, then documenting findings in a way that someone could actually act on. the reporting side matters just as much as the technical side.
the journey has been from random curiosity to structured security research. learning to think like an attacker to build better defences. still ongoing — there's always another vector to understand, another technique to practice.