Career path · SOC analyst

Defensive Security Pathway: networking and Linux to security engineering

Seven courses from reading a packet capture to engineering the detections a security team runs on: networking, Linux administration, SOC investigation, incident response, detection engineering, security engineering, and the attacker's side of web security. Five of the seven include a hosted lab on a real virtual machine.

Starting level
No experience needed
Content time
106 h 55 min
lesson time, from the published courses
Suggested pace
About 17 weeks
planning estimate, at your own pace
Weekly commitment
5–8 hours
suggested study time
Courses
7
Lessons
70
Labs
5
on real virtual machines
Certificate
On completion
Ultiblob-issued, verifiable by serial
Sign in to enrollEmployee sign-in$249.00 · Introductory pricing. Review the current price before checkout.
Three learners at a lab table with laptops and a server on a cart.

Before you start

Is this path for you?

Defensive security taught in the order the work actually demands it. You cannot triage an alert on a host you do not understand, so the path starts with networking and Linux and only then reaches the SOC — logs, alerts, and deciding which of them matters. The second half is the harder half: running an incident to its end, writing the detections rather than consuming them, hardening the systems, and seeing how a web application is attacked. 70 lessons, about 107 hours of lesson content, with graded checks throughout.

Who it is for

  • Career changers starting with no security background
  • IT support and systems staff moving into a security operations team
  • Junior SOC analysts who want the engineering half of the role
  • Administrators responsible for detection and response at a smaller organisation

What you should know

  • Comfortable using a computer and a web browser
  • No prior networking, Linux or security experience is assumed

What you will need

  • A computer with a current web browser
  • A stable internet connection
  • Lab machines are hosted by Ultiblob and isolated from every other tenant; nothing is installed on your own computer

Curriculum

5 stages, in the order the work happens

Stage 1

Networking and Linux

  1. Networking and Linux

Stage 2

SOC investigations

  1. SOC investigations

Stage 3

Incident response

  1. Incident response

Stage 4

Detection engineering

  1. Detection engineering

Stage 5

Security engineering

  1. Security engineering

Hands-on

Labs on this path

Each of these courses provisions virtual machines for you on the Ultiblob cluster and opens a console in your browser. The topology below is the published blueprint — roles and operating systems only.

Price and enrollment

$249.00

Introductory pricing. Review the current price before checkout.

  • labs included
  • certificate on completion

Before you decide

What we will not promise

  • A job, a salary, or an employer introduction. We teach and we let you practise; we do not place people.
  • Accreditation. An Ultiblob certificate records what you completed here. It is not an industry certification.
  • Statistics we have not measured. You will not find completion rates, placement rates or student counts on this site until they exist and are audited.

We would rather lose you here than mislead you.

$249.00

introductory price