The Arsenal
The tools I reach for daily, grouped by discipline. "Level" is a rough self-rating — Daily means muscle memory, Familiar means I know it but don't live in it.
Offensive
Burp Suite
DailyPrimary tool for web app testing — proxying, repeater, and intruder for manual exploitation.
Nmap
DailyFirst step on almost every engagement — service/version detection and initial attack surface mapping.
Metasploit
ProficientExploitation framework for validating known vulnerabilities and post-exploitation modules.
Hydra
FamiliarCredential brute-forcing against common services when scope allows.
Blue Team
Wireshark
DailyPacket-level traffic analysis for both offense (recon) and defense (incident investigation).
ELK Stack
ProficientLog ingestion and correlation for building out detections and triage dashboards.
Maltego
ProficientEntity correlation for OSINT — mapping relationships between people, domains, and infrastructure.
Nessus
FamiliarVulnerability scanning for baseline coverage before manual testing.
Dev
Nuxt / Vue
DailyThis site — and most tool dashboards I build — run on Nuxt.
Python
DailyAutomation, custom recon scripts, and the backbone of most tooling I write.
Docker
ProficientReproducible environments for both engagements and local dev.
FastAPI
ProficientBackend framework of choice when a project needs a real API layer.