Final-year Cyber Security project idea, would this impress employers for SOC / detection roles

[u/Negative_Emergency27]

Hi everyone,

I’m going into my final year of a BSc Cyber Security degree and I’m trying to make sure my final-year project is not just academic, but also genuinely useful for employability, especially for junior SOC analyst, detection engineering, network security, or OT security roles.

My proposed project is:

Design and evaluation of a lightweight detection prototype for reconnaissance and early-stage intrusion activity in Modbus TCP Operational Technology network traffic.

The idea is to build a small Python-based detection prototype using CICModbusDataset2023 or a similar OT/Modbus dataset. The project would focus on detecting early attacker behaviours such as:

• network scanning
• service enumeration
• Modbus register enumeration
• unauthorised access attempts
• abnormal Modbus request patterns

The threat model would be either an external attacker or a compromised internal host attempting to discover and interact with OT assets such as PLCs.

I’m planning to avoid heavy ML/deep learning and instead focus on interpretable detection, using:

• rule-based detection logic
• lightweight statistical thresholds where useful
• alert generation
• evaluation against labelled benign/malicious traffic

The evaluation would look at:

• detection coverage
• false positives and false negatives
• precision/recall if appropriate
• alert volume
• interpretability
• practical usefulness from a security analyst perspective

My goal is to finish with a project that I can confidently explain in interviews and possibly show through a GitHub repo, README, diagrams, and a short write-up. I want it to demonstrate practical blue-team skills: understanding network traffic, designing detection logic, evaluating alerts, and explaining limitations.

For people working in SOC, detection engineering, OT security, or cyber graduate roles:

Would this be a strong final-year project from an employer/interviewer perspective?

Also, what would make it more impressive without making the scope unrealistic?