Top 12 Security Assistant Skills to Put on Your Resume

Security teams move fast. Threats shape-shift. If you want to thrive as a Security Assistant, sharpen the skills that matter most and show you can jump from detection to response without flinching. Below are the core twelve. Concrete. Employer-friendly. Battle-tested.

Security Assistant Skills

1. CyberArk
2. Splunk
3. Nessus
4. Wireshark
5. Palo Alto
6. Active Directory
7. AWS Security
8. Cisco ASA
9. SIEM
10. Kali Linux
11. BitLocker
12. RSA Archer

1. CyberArk

CyberArk delivers Privileged Access Management (PAM) to protect and govern high-risk accounts, credentials, and secrets across servers, endpoints, cloud, and DevOps pipelines. Lock down the keys to the kingdom, shrink blast radius, and watch lateral movement stall.

Why It's Important

Privileged accounts are prime targets. CyberArk helps secure, rotate, monitor, and audit them, cutting off common breach paths and simplifying oversight.

How to Improve CyberArk Skills

1. Patch promptly: Keep Vault, PVWA, CPM, PSM, and connectors current to close known holes.

2. Tighten policies: Enforce strong rotation, check-out approvals, session recording, and just-in-time access. Turn least privilege from slogan into practice.

3. Hunt anomalies: Tune alerts on unusual access patterns and failed check-outs; integrate with your SIEM for correlation.

4. Audit relentlessly: Review privileged activities, reconcile orphaned accounts, and prove compliance with clean evidence trails.

5. Expand coverage: Onboard service accounts, cloud IAM roles, containers, and secrets used in CI/CD.

6. Train operators: Short, recurring drills for admins and requesters reduce mistakes when the heat is on.

How to Display CyberArk Skills on Your Resume

2. Splunk

Splunk collects, searches, and visualizes machine data at scale. Great for threat hunting, alerting, and incident timelines that make sense.

Why It's Important

You can’t defend what you can’t see. Splunk lights up logs, metrics, and traces in one place so investigations move from guesswork to evidence.

How to Improve Splunk Skills

1. Write efficient searches: Use targeted indexes, time bounds, and tstats; trim wildcards; summarize with data models.

2. Curate data: Normalize fields (CIM), drop noisy events, and tag critical assets so detections stay sharp.

3. Automate the grind: Scheduled reports, correlation searches, and adaptive response actions shorten mean time to respond.

4. Dashboards that decide: Build role-based views for SOC, IR, and execs; surface context, not clutter.

5. Keep current: Update forwarders and add-ons; review limits.conf as volumes grow.

How to Display Splunk Skills on Your Resume

3. Nessus

Nessus scans systems and networks for known vulnerabilities and misconfigurations, producing actionable findings to prioritize remediation.

Why It's Important

It reveals what’s exposed before attackers do. Clear lists. Severity ratings. Fast iteration.

How to Improve Nessus Skills

1. Update engines and plugins: Fresh checks spot fresh flaws.

2. Use credentialed scans: Deeper visibility, fewer false positives.

3. Tailor policies: Segment by asset class; exclude fragile systems; throttle for reliability.

4. Prioritize smartly: Combine severity with exploitability and business impact; fix what matters first.

5. Integrate workflow: Push findings into ticketing, SIEM, and CMDB; track remediation SLAs.

6. Rescan and verify: Remediation isn’t done until the follow-up scan says so.

How to Display Nessus Skills on Your Resume

4. Wireshark

A protocol analyzer that captures packets and shows what’s really traversing the wire. When logs whisper, packets tell the truth.

Why It's Important

It helps pinpoint misconfigurations, malware beacons, and broken handshakes, accelerating root-cause analysis.

How to Improve Wireshark Skills

1. Stay updated: New dissectors and fixes decode modern protocols correctly.

2. Filter like a pro: Craft precise display and capture filters; save filter libraries for repeat use.

3. Decrypt when possible: Use session keys or enterprise TLS decryption for legitimate inspection with approvals.

4. Isolate analysis: Capture in a VM or dedicated station; protect pcap files—they often contain sensitive data.

5. Extend carefully: Add plugins and external tools for enrichment; vet sources before install.

How to Display Wireshark Skills on Your Resume

5. Palo Alto

Palo Alto Networks provides next-gen firewalls and cloud defenses that inspect traffic deeply, stop known and unknown threats, and bridge on-prem with cloud.

Why It's Important

Consistent policy, threat prevention, and visibility across users, apps, and locations—tight control without guesswork.

How to Improve Palo Alto Skills

1. Update content and PAN-OS: Apply threat, AV, and App-ID updates; plan OS upgrades with change windows.

2. Follow best practices: Zone properly, enable decryption where approved, block high-risk apps, and apply least privilege security policies.

3. Use threat intel: Apply external dynamic lists and curated feeds; tune signatures and profiles.

4. Watch the logs: Monitor ACC, Traffic, Threat, and URL logs; build reports that spot drift fast.

5. Keep skills sharp: Hands-on labs and vendor training pay off when incidents spark.

How to Display Palo Alto Skills on Your Resume

6. Active Directory

Active Directory centralizes identities, policies, and access for Windows domains. Domain controllers authenticate, authorize, and enforce settings across the fleet.

Why It's Important

AD is often the crown jewel. If it’s hardened, attackers sweat. If it’s loose, they sprint.

How to Improve Active Directory Skills

1. Patch DCs and members: Close privilege escalation and auth bugs quickly.

2. Limit admin rights: Tiered administration, separate admin accounts, and just-in-time elevation.

3. Enable MFA: Enforce multi-factor for privileged roles; integrate with Microsoft Entra ID (formerly Azure AD) where appropriate.

4. Audit everything: Advanced auditing on logons, group changes, GPO edits, and replication; forward to SIEM.

5. Password hygiene: Strong policies, fine-grained PSOs, and breached-password protection.

6. Harden DCs: Secure baseline, protected users/groups, SMB signing, LDAP over TLS, and constrained delegation.

7. Back up and test restore: System state backups, offline copies, and rehearsal of recovery runbooks.

How to Display Active Directory Skills on Your Resume

7. AWS Security

Security in AWS means getting identity, isolation, encryption, monitoring, and automation right—using native controls that scale.

Why It's Important

Cloud speed cuts both ways. Strong guardrails prevent small missteps from becoming loud incidents.

How to Improve AWS Security Skills

1. IAM least privilege: Roles over users, scoped policies, permission boundaries, and access analyzer to catch overreach.

2. MFA and strong auth: Enforce MFA for root and admins; use identity federation or AWS IAM Identity Center for centralized access.

3. Encrypt by default: KMS for keys, default S3 bucket encryption, TLS everywhere, and key rotation with strict separation of duties.

4. Network segmentation: VPCs, subnets, security groups, and NACLs; restrict egress; private endpoints for services.

5. Detect and respond: Enable CloudTrail org-wide, GuardDuty for threat intel, Security Hub for control mapping, and CloudWatch for alerting.

6. Continuous assessment: Use Config rules, Inspector, and regular posture reviews; remediate with automation.

7. S3 sanity checks: Block public access at account and bucket level; monitor for policy drift.

How to Display AWS Security Skills on Your Resume

8. Cisco ASA

Cisco ASA provides firewalling, VPN, and foundational threat protections. Many environments still rely on ASA while adopting newer platforms.

Why It's Important

It enforces perimeters, secures remote access, and segments networks—the basics that still block a lot of bad.

How to Improve Cisco ASA Skills

1. Stay current: Update ASA software to patch vulnerabilities; review advisories routinely.

2. Harden configs: Principle of least privilege ACLs, object groups for clarity, strong crypto suites, and admin access controls.

3. Threat visibility: Enable and tune threat detection; send logs to a central syslog or SIEM.

4. VPN robustness: Use modern IKE/IPsec settings, certificate-based auth where possible, and posture checks.

5. Segment wisely: Use interfaces and VLANs to isolate critical zones; document flows and enforce egress rules.

6. Periodic audits: Review NAT, ACL hit counts, and unused objects; simplify rules over time.

How to Display Cisco ASA Skills on Your Resume

9. SIEM

Security Information and Event Management centralizes logs, correlates signals, and surfaces threats so responders can act fast.

Why It's Important

It’s the heartbeat of the SOC. Without it, detection fragments; with it, patterns pop.

How to Improve SIEM Skills

1. Patch and scale: Keep engines updated; right-size storage, retention, and ingestion pipelines.

2. Collect broadly, normalize: Pull logs from endpoints, identity, network, cloud, and apps; standardize fields for reliable rules.

3. Tune correlation: Reduce noise; add context (asset criticality, user risk); iterate on use cases monthly.

4. Feed threat intel: Ingest curated intelligence and suppress known benigns; revisit indicators often.

5. Automate response: Pair with SOAR playbooks for enrichment, containment, and ticketing.

6. Measure outcomes: Track MTTD/MTTR, false positive rates, and coverage gaps; prune what doesn’t help.

How to Display SIEM Skills on Your Resume

10. Kali Linux

A Debian-based distro packed with tools for red teaming, forensics, and security validation. It’s the Swiss Army knife for probing weaknesses safely and ethically.

Why It's Important

Lets you validate defenses, replicate attacker behavior, and turn theoretical risks into concrete fixes.

How to Improve Kali Linux Skills

1. Update often: Keep system and tools fresh with regular package upgrades.

2. Harden the box: Disable unused services, enforce strong SSH settings, and add intrusion prevention like fail2ban.

3. Mind your footprint: Use a VPN or approved egress path; isolate labs from production.

4. Customize loadouts: Build tool profiles for web, wireless, AD, or cloud engagements; script common workflows.

5. Back up configs: Preserve wordlists, custom modules, and results so reimaging never burns your work.

6. Document ethically: Get written authorization; capture scope and evidence cleanly.

How to Display Kali Linux Skills on Your Resume

11. BitLocker

Full-disk encryption built into Windows that protects data at rest on lost, stolen, or decommissioned devices.

Why It's Important

If the device walks away, the data doesn’t. Compliance breathes easier too.

How to Improve BitLocker Skills

1. TPM + PIN: Require pre-boot authentication on sensitive devices to defeat simple theft.

2. Secure Boot on: Block untrusted bootloaders and rootkits from sidestepping protections.

3. Strong policies: Enforce XTS-AES with appropriate key length, disable weak ciphers, and require enhanced PINs where supported.

4. Network Unlock (enterprise): Streamline patch cycles for wired, trusted segments without sacrificing security.

5. Key escrow: Store recovery info in secure directories or MDM; verify retrieval works before you need it.

6. Firmware and OS updates: Keep UEFI/BIOS and Windows current to avoid bypassable flaws.

7. Encrypt used space on new builds: Faster deployment; all future writes remain encrypted.

How to Display BitLocker Skills on Your Resume

12. RSA Archer

A platform for governance, risk, and compliance that maps risks, controls, and incidents into one source of truth.

Why It's Important

It turns scattered spreadsheets into managed programs—risk owners, workflows, evidence, and reporting that stands up to audits.

How to Improve RSA Archer Skills

1. Update and harden: Maintain current versions and secure integrations, accounts, and data flows.

2. Model your reality: Customize applications, fields, and workflows to match how your organization actually operates.

3. Integrate signals: Pull in vulnerability data, asset inventories, and incident feeds; push tasks to ticketing systems.

4. Standardize methods: Use consistent risk scoring, control libraries, and evidence requirements across teams.

5. Teach the users: Short role-based training keeps data quality high and processes humming.

How to Display RSA Archer Skills on Your Resume