so if you're trying to become a sock analyst and are looking for practical hands-on experience by the end of this video you'll have 10 sites that you can use to level up your skills on investigations detections tooling and many more if you're new to this channel hi my name is Stephen and I've been in the cyber security industry specifically within the security operations domain for over half a decade and I have interviewed a lot of candidates and the one thing that most of them do not have is on unfortunately hands-on experience these 10 sites that I'm going to share with you is going to give you those hands-on experience that many lack and will make you stand out from others starting with number one cyber Defenders cyber Defenders offers a lot of variety when it comes to Labs there are some that offer Network forensics endpoint Mau reverse engineering and even threat intelligence they offer a free and paid plan so you can try them out for free personally I do use this quite often to help me build up my skills especially when I was trying to transition from a sock analyst to a deer consultant number two Blue Team level one labs this platform has a lot of labs available for you to choose from they have two types of trainings one is called investigation and the other is called challenges the difference between the two is that investigations will provide you with a browser based virtual machine so that means that you can start playing around even if your computer does not have enough resources now if your computer does have enough resources you can try out the challenges where you'll be able to download the lab artifacts and then open them up in your own virtual machine number three let's defend I highly recommend this platform to anyone who is looking for a simulated sock environment let's defend allows you to get a taste of what you can expect in a sock by providing you with alerts that will allow you to triage and investigate they also have challenges that you can spin up in their own browser based virtual machine and even quizzes to test your knowledge in specific areas pretty cool stuff number four try hack me probably one of the more popular Platforms in cyber security especially for red teamers those who are interested in hacking and risk assessment however over the course of years tryhackme and the community has developed a lot of blue team sock related Labs AKA rooms that will help guide you in learning a particular skill a pretty neat feature that try hack me offers is called King of the Hill where you get to join a lobby with up to 10 players and the objective is to defend and attack a machine number five hack the Box similar to try hackme this is another popular platform for red teamers I mean hack is literally part of the name but just like try hack me hack the box over the years have created Amazing Blue Team related challenges and the one that I want to point out is called Sherlock challenges these are investigative challenges that have you acting as a Defender and your objective is to determine what had happened post compromise seriously try this out if you want to test your skills number six range Force One of the Lesser known Platforms in my opinion but they are still pretty good range Force has over 16 hours of free content well you'll get to learn about incident response reverse engineering fishing and emerging threat threats all of which are great skills to have number seven Ace responder similar to rangeforce one of the more lesser known platforms but offer Rich content when it comes to Blue Team related Labs now the downside here is that all but one lab requires a subscription so unless you plan on paying you might want to look elsewhere they also provide videos that do a fantastic job on demonstrating how attacks work so if you're ever curious and want to learn more about it and your visual learner this might be a great resource to have number eight M Traffic analysis packet captures or it didn't happen network analysis is one of those skills that can and will set you apart if you wanted to see how malicious traffic looks like on the network well maare traffic analysis is the site to use this site is hosted by Brad Duncan who is a threat intelligence analyst over at Pao Alto and with his incredible work this site gets updated with new and interesting m pretty often what this means is that you get to stay on top of emerging threats and who knows you might even encounter something similar in your environment and if you do well you'll know how to analyze it number nine kc7 if you have never heard of kc7 well you are in for a treat kc7 makes cyber security trading fun not only is their platform free but they have you use kql custo Query language which is what Microsoft aure uses what this means is that by using the platform you'll get to level up your skills in kql allowing you to sift through data quickly construct complex queries and eventually putting this onto your resume as one of your skill sets which is quite beneficial since a lot of modern socks nowadays use kql last but not least number 10 def box this platform is pretty new I mean look at the created date of the domain which is back in August 17th 2023 less than a year ago as a recording and if you're familiar with my channel you'll know that I love building projects and investigating post compromise activities using various tools however that requires a lot of setup and preparation but with def boox you can get started right away def box allows you to spin up a virtual machine that includes a Sim already built in and includes the data set within it so you can start querying and get familiar with the logs the cool part about def box is that with a click of a button you'll get to generate attack telemetry tree so you don't even need to spin up Atomic red team or Caldera this does it all for you as a new upand cominging platform I would highly recommend that you give de box a try and see if this is something that you might enjoy compared to the other sites that I provided at the end of the day everyone's learning style is different so one site might not fit your needs compared to the others and this is why I decided to provide you with 10 sites so now you have a nice variety to choose from a lot of individuals trying to get into cyber security and become a sock analyst only have theory in their back pocket this is simply not enough you must get comfortable being uncomfortable and take on challenges that will push you to your limits if you ever get stuck research and find writeups on how a certain task was completed on my channel I have walkthroughs for some of the labs that you can follow along with and I'll be including a lot more in the future that is it for the video and I hope you found that informative if you did let me know by hitting that like button and subscribe if you want to remember to stay curious and do things differently