Nick O'Grady - TryHackMe Blog

Sign in Subscribe

Nick O'Grady

How to Become a Threat Intelligence Analyst: Career Path, Skills and First Steps

This guide walks through what the role actually involves day to day, the skills and certifications that matter, and the concrete first steps to take if this is the direction you want your career to go.

SQL Injection From Scratch: How to Practise It Safely in a Lab

This guide walks through what SQL injection actually is, how it works under the hood, the main types you will encounter, and how to practise finding and exploiting it safely, without ever touching a system you do not have permission to test.

Bug Bounty Hunting for Beginners: Your First Practical Guide

Every week, companies pay strangers on the internet to break into their websites. Not illegally. Not maliciously. On purpose, with permission, and often for genuinely good money. That is bug bounty hunting, and if you have ever wondered how people get paid to hack, this is where it actually starts.

Adversarial Machine Learning for Cyber Defenders: What It Is and How to Learn It

For cyber defenders in 2026, this is no longer a research topic. It is operational reality. The ML-based detection tools in your SOC, the AI models processing threat intelligence, the LLM-powered automation in your security workflow: all of them are targets.

Introducing TryHackMe MAX

Introducing TryHackMe MAX

MAX is our most powerful plan to date. It brings together the content that working practitioners have been asking for most: advanced learning paths that map to mid-career security roles, including AWS and Azure cloud security labs, a permanent AttackBox, recent threats content, and more.

TryHackMe Certification Guide

Every exam in the TryHackMe certification programme puts you inside a live environment with real tooling. No multiple choice. No theory questions. You investigate real alerts, run real attacks, and submit graded professional reports.

How to Practise Active Directory Attacks: A Lab Guide for Red Teamers

Knowing what Kerberoasting is and being able to execute it fluently under engagement pressure are two different things. The gap between them is closed by one thing: lab repetition.

How to Hunt Threats With Splunk and Wazuh: A Practical SOC Analyst Guide

61% of organisations cite staffing as their top threat-hunting barrier. The analysts who close that gap fastest are the ones who practise with real tools on real data before they walk into a SOC environment for the first time.

How to Start a Career in Cloud Security: What You Need to Know in 2026

Cloud security is one of the fastest-growing and best-paid specialisations in cyber security right now. Cloud security spending is projected to grow 18% annually, driven by increasing cyber threats and multi-cloud adoption.

Best CTF Platforms for Penetration Testers: How to Choose and What to Practise

Not all CTF platforms are built for the same purpose. Some are designed for beginners finding their feet. Some are academic competition environments.

How to Find and Fix Web Vulnerabilities: A Beginner's Practical Guide

This guide covers the OWASP Top 10 2025 - the most widely cited web application security standard in the world - with practical guidance on what each vulnerability looks like, how to find it, and how to remediate it.

Active Directory Attacks You Can Practise Today: A Red Teamer's Lab Guide

Active Directory is the identity backbone in more than 95% of midsize and large enterprises running a Microsoft stack. It is also the attack surface that red teamers spend the most time on.

How to Build a Cyber Security Home Lab for Beginners: Free Setup, No Hardware Required

Here is what most guides do not tell you: in 2026, you do not need to build a local lab at all. TryHackMe gives you a fully configured attack machine, vulnerable targets, guided scenarios, and a public profile tracking your progress, all in a browser, for free.

How SOC Analysts Actually Hunt Threats: A Practical Guide to Threat Hunting in a Browser

Alert triage is reactive. You wait for a detection to fire, investigate the alert, and either close it or escalate. Threat hunting is different. You do not wait.

CTF Practice for Penetration Testers: How to Use Challenges to Build Real Offensive Skills

CTFs are not just for beginners finding their feet. The best penetration testers use them deliberately - to sharpen specific techniques, stay sharp between engagements, and build documented evidence of offensive capability that portfolios and job applications need.

How to Build an Incident Response Career: From First SOC Role to IR Analyst

Incident response is where the real investigation happens. While SOC Tier 1 analysts triage alerts and filter noise, IR analysts take over when something genuinely bad is confirmed: they determine the scope of a compromise, contain it, eradicate the attacker, and reconstruct exactly what happened.

What AI Security Skills Should Defenders Actually Learn in 2026?

This is not a "the future is AI" think piece. It is a practical breakdown of the specific skills that defenders need in 2026, grounded in what attackers are actually doing and what the frameworks say defenders should know. Start here.

How to Prepare for a Red Team Interview: Skills, Labs and What to Expect

The candidates who perform best in red team interviews are the ones who have done the work in advance. Not just studied it. Done it, in live lab environments, enough times that the methodology feels automatic. Here is how to get there.

How to Start a Vulnerability Assessment Home Lab: Tools, Setup and First Steps

A vulnerability assessment home lab is where the skill actually develops. You can read about Nmap flags and CVSS scoring for weeks and still freeze in front of a real target.

Switching to Cyber Security Mid-Career: A Realistic 2026 Guide

With consistent effort, most mid-career switchers reach their first entry-level cyber security role within 12 to 18 months. That assumes you are putting in real hours, not dabbling. Ten hours a week of focused, structured practice moves the needle.

How to Become an Ethical Hacker: Career Guide, Certifications and First Steps

Let's cut straight to it. Ethical hacking is legal, structured, and one of the most in-demand technical careers in the world right now. The BLS projects 32% growth for information security roles through 2032. Median salaries sit above $120,000 across all experience levels.

How to Get Started With Cloud Security: Skills, Labs and Learning Path

The challenge is that most cloud security learning resources either assume you already understand cloud platforms or assume you already understand security. Very few start from where most people actually are: somewhere in between. This guide does.

How to Prepare for OSCP: A Realistic Study Guide for 2026

This guide is the realistic version. What OSCP actually tests. What prepared actually means. How long it genuinely takes. And the exact preparation path that gives you the best chance of passing on your first attempt.

What Is AI Security? A Practical Introduction for Cyber Security Professionals

If you work in cyber security and you have not started thinking about AI security yet, now is the time. The attack surface is real, it is growing, and the skills to address it are still rare enough to be a genuine career differentiator.

Cyber Security Certification Roadmap 2026

Every certification on this roadmap is practical. No multiple choice memory tests. No rote recall. Every exam puts you in a live environment and asks you to do the work. That is what employers are starting to care about, and it is what TryHackMe has built its certification programme around.