Security is where theory meets adversarial thinking: to defend a system well, you have to understand how it gets attacked. I teach students both sides of that fence - offensive techniques in safe, isolated labs, and the defensive engineering that stops them working in the real world.
Ethics and law run through the whole area. Students learn not just what is technically possible, but what is legal, responsible, and professional.
Topics I cover
Penetration testing with Kali Linux
A structured methodology - reconnaissance, scanning, exploitation, reporting - using the industry-standard toolkit: Nmap, Burp Suite, Metasploit and friends, all inside legal lab environments.
Web application attacks
SQL injection, cross-site scripting, and broken authentication - why they happen, how they’re found, and how parameterised queries and input validation shut them down.
Active Directory security
How Windows domains are attacked and hardened: enumeration, privilege escalation paths, and the configuration hygiene that keeps a corporate network defensible.
Network defence and monitoring
Firewalls, segmentation, logging and detection - thinking like a defender who assumes the attacker will eventually get a foothold.
Explore: the five phases of a penetration test
Professional security testing follows a disciplined process, not guesswork. Click or tap each stage to explore it.
How I teach it
Everything offensive happens in isolated lab environments where attacking is legal and encouraged - then students switch sides and defend against the same techniques, tuning detection and closing holes.
Before anyone touches a tool, we establish the rule that defines the profession: written authorisation. The technical skills are identical to a criminal’s; the authorisation, scope, and report are what make it a career.
Test yourself
Three quick questions - click an answer to check it instantly.
1. SQL injection attacks work by exploiting what?
2. Which phase of a penetration test comes first?
3. What makes hacking ‘ethical’?
Where this leads
Security awareness is now expected of every computing graduate, and specialists are in chronic shortage - penetration testing, security operations, and security engineering are among the strongest career paths in the field. This area builds directly on my networking and database teaching: you can’t secure what you don’t understand.
