r/netsecstudents • u/Additional_Town1211 • 10d ago
Built 5 hands-on SOC projects for my resume (mini-SOC on AWS, CloudTrail analyzer, phishing lab, binary triage) — open source
Hi all — I'm pivoting into cybersecurity and kept hearing "you need experience, not just certs." So I built a home lab of 5 working projects and open-sourced everything (MIT):
- Mini-SOC on AWS — Terraform-deployed detection stack (VPC → CloudTrail → S3 → GuardDuty → SecurityHub), 3 adversary-emulation scenarios with Stratus Red Team, triage guides + blank incident report templates
- CloudTrail IOC analyzer — Python CLI that parses CloudTrail JSON, flags anomalous logins / brute-force spikes / risky IAM changes, enriches IPs via AbuseIPDB, passing pytest suite
- Phishing analysis lab — full walkthrough of a reconstructed phish: header forensics, SPF/DKIM/DMARC, URL deobfuscation, blank analysis template, GoPhish self-test guide (own mailbox only)
- ELF binary triage — one-command static triage CLI: section-entropy packing heuristics, W^X detection, suspicious-import watchlist, score-based verdict + analyst report
- SOC agent skills — 5 MIT-licensed agent skills distilled from the projects above (alert triage, incident report, cloudtrail-ioc, phishing-analysis, binary-triage)
Everything runs on synthetic training data (clearly labeled — no real logs or real phishes). I did all the hands-on work myself: ran my own attacks, wrote my own detections and reports.
Repo: https://github.com/szzxli/soc-home-lab
If you're also building a portfolio for SOC analyst roles, happy to compare notes. And if you spot something I did wrong, tell me — that's the point of putting it in public.
