The Cyber Knights

Whenever I meet someone at a tech conference the first question I always get is, “Who are the Cyber Knights?” I have practiced my response in the mirror several times now, “We are an organization that provides free training for people wanting to transition into infosec, and conduct various R&D projects.” Today I have decided to expand beyond this elevator conversation and actually share the purpose and history of the Cyber Knights.

It all started in a networking certification course taught in my home town of Santa Ana, CA in 2018. The final project in the class was building out a server stack that would become part of a network we put together as a class. I chose to study the topic of intrusion detection systems while making the attempt to coordinate with the other security orientated students. Jeff Whitaker was the other student wanting to work on security aspects and signed up for Firewall duties( I am very lucky to consider Jeff one of my closest friends now). With two other students, we formed what I nicknamed the ‘security team’. I figured that we better build the network architecture with a single plan for segmentation and monitoring. Reaching out into topics most of us were first reading about we built a basic segmented network with the usual DMZ and ‘private zones”. Network monitoring was accomplished using Security Onion and firewall duty was left to PFSense in true open-source fashion.

After the class ended I asked the team a simple question, “Why don’t we just keep going”? The Cyber Knights were born. Once a week we all dragged our equipment to my patio and continued learning the core concepts of infosec. We now meet virtually at least twice a month. Beyond just learning we also built the ethics that would lead us in our journey. I wrote an oath that every Knight would take to make sure that the skills being taught would only be used to help others.

“The Internet is for everyone, to be used without fear.

We stand up to the malicious.

We stop those who would ransom.

We never give up against any threat, for we are the Cyber Knights!”

Since our humble beginnings, we have helped several individuals learn the skills needed to make the inroads into infosec. My own success using freelance platforms to build up a resume has been promising, while others have been able to take up various IT positions. More importantly, we have expanded our research projects into topics like the Game Theory of MITRE ATT&CK and advanced use cases of the Elastic Stack. We have a little project called Excalibur that actually integrates Elastic with the Unreal 4 Game Engine to create a virtual world that is actually being created by the real data of a network environment. I describe it as something like Tron, but real.

Anyone is welcomed to reach out to me if you are interested in hanging out with us and learning more about cybersecurity. I have a background in education since I actually got a history degree from UCR and have spent time as a professional tutor and teaching Job Search skills at Colleges before moving into infosec. More than anything we want to follow the example of those we have learned so much from and help give back to the community.