References

This handbook draws on publicly available security research, vendor advisories, and well-known industry resources. If you want to go deeper into any topic covered here, these are good places to start.

Vulnerability Databases

CVE (MITRE)

The canonical catalog of publicly disclosed vulnerabilities, identified by CVE ID.

NVD (NIST)

The National Vulnerability Database — CVE entries enriched with severity scores (CVSS) and metadata.

Exploit-DB

An archive of public exploits and proof-of-concept code for known vulnerabilities.

MITRE ATT&CK

A knowledge base of real-world adversary tactics and techniques used post-exploitation.

Standards & Guidance

OWASP

Community-driven resources on application security, including the well-known OWASP Top 10.

CISA

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency — advisories and the Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog.

Research & Disclosure

Project Zero

Google's security research team — deep technical write-ups on real, in-the-wild zero-days.

Citizen Lab

University of Toronto research group that has uncovered spyware campaigns including Pegasus.

Bug Bounty Platforms

HackerOne

One of the largest bug bounty and coordinated disclosure platforms, connecting researchers with vendor programs.

Bugcrowd

Crowdsourced security platform running bug bounty and vulnerability disclosure programs.

Case Studies Referenced

Stuxnet — Symantec and Kaspersky technical write-ups on the worm's four chained Windows zero-days.
WannaCry / EternalBlue — CVE-2017-0144; NHS Digital and CERT-EU incident advisories.
Heartbleed — CVE-2014-0160; the original disclosure at heartbleed.com by Codenomicon and Google Security.
Log4Shell — CVE-2021-44228; Apache Software Foundation security advisory.
Pegasus / FORCEDENTRY — CVE-2021-30860; Citizen Lab's original research report, and Google Project Zero's technical deep-dive.