Top 12 Information Security Analyst Skills to Put on Your Resume

In today's digital age, Information Security Analysts shoulder the quiet, relentless work of shielding data and systems. A focused resume that spotlights the right skills signals you can hunt threats, harden defenses, and keep integrity intact when the winds get ugly.

Information Security Analyst Skills

1. Python
2. Wireshark
3. Splunk
4. Nessus
5. SIEM
6. AWS
7. Azure
8. Firewall Management
9. Cryptography
10. Blockchain
11. Incident Response
12. Penetration Testing

1. Python

Python is a high-level language beloved by analysts because it bends to the job at hand: automation, parsing logs, stitching APIs together, and building scrappy tools that expose problems fast.

Why It's Important

Python speeds up detection and response. With rich libraries and quick iteration, you can automate dull work, analyze mountains of data, and prototype security checks in hours instead of weeks.

How to Improve Python Skills

Sharpen your edge with habits that actually move the needle:

1. Nail the core: Solid control flow, data structures, modules, packaging, venvs or pipx. Read the official documentation and write small utilities daily.

2. Use the right security libraries: Scapy, cryptography, PyCryptodome, impacket, paramiko, requests, pydantic. Learn when to prefer standard libs over third-party code.

3. Automate your world: Write collectors for logs, enrich IOCs, schedule jobs, and build CLI tools with argparse or Typer. Glue APIs together to reduce swivel-chair work.

4. Parse and analyze: Get comfortable with regex, JSON, CSV, and PCAP parsing. Use pandas sparingly for heavy analysis; keep memory in mind.

5. Quality matters: Tests with pytest, type hints with mypy, linting with Ruff or flake8, formatting with Black. Secure coding patterns, no secrets in code, signed commits.

6. Learn by building: Write a log enricher, a phishing URL classifier, a lightweight Sigma-to-SPL converter, or a script that diff-scans vulnerability results.

7. Stay current: Follow security communities and open-source repos; study others’ tooling and patterns. Iterate relentlessly.

With steady practice, Python becomes a force multiplier in your security toolkit.

How to Display Python Skills on Your Resume

2. Wireshark

Wireshark dissects network packets down to the byte, unveiling protocols, payloads, and oddities you can’t see anywhere else. It’s the microscope for suspicious network behavior.

Why It's Important

When alarms ring, packet captures tell the truth. Wireshark helps confirm exfiltration, decode weird handshakes, spot misconfigurations, and validate whether an “incident” is real or just noise.

How to Improve Wireshark Skills

Make the tool sing by tightening technique:

1. Filters and profiles: Master display filters, color rules, and custom profiles. Build quick toggles for TLS, DNS, HTTP/2, QUIC, Kerberos, SMB.

2. Decryption know-how: Use key log files for TLS, handle perfect forward secrecy with SSLKEYLOGFILE, and understand when server keys won’t help.

3. Command-line power: TShark, Mergecap, Editcap. Automate repetitive parsing, slice captures, and batch-export fields to feed detections.

4. Reassembly and exports: Reassemble streams, extract objects, follow TCP, and carve files carefully while preserving evidence.

5. Protocol intuition: Learn normal baselines. Spot jitter, retransmits, malformed packets, and odd timing patterns fast.

6. Continuous practice: Review public PCAPs, join community Q&A, and troubleshoot real incidents to build instinct.

With sharp filters and disciplined workflows, Wireshark becomes a fast, precise ally.

How to Display Wireshark Skills on Your Resume

3. Splunk

Splunk ingests, indexes, and queries machine data at scale. For security teams, it’s both a search engine and an alarm bell.

Why It's Important

It centralizes telemetry, correlates signals, and accelerates investigations. Real-time detection, forensic depth, and reporting—one place, many lenses.

How to Improve Splunk Skills

Turn raw logs into reliable detections:

1. Write tighter SPL: Reduce data early, use eval, stats, tstats, and summary indexing. Keep searches efficient and readable.

2. Normalize data: Map to the Common Information Model, fix sourcetypes, and standardize fields so content is reusable.

3. Operationalize detections: Risk-based alerting, notable events, suppression logic, and thresholds tied to baselines.

4. Enrich smartly: Lookups, KV Store, macros, tags, and asset/identity data to add context without blowing up costs.

5. Dashboards that matter: Build concise, actionable views with tokens and drilldowns. Show risk, not just counts.

6. Lean into analytics: Use built-in machine learning carefully for anomaly detection and outlier spotting; validate outcomes.

7. Keep content fresh: Align detections to MITRE ATT&CK, review false positives weekly, and retire noisy rules.

Good Splunk craft means fewer blind spots and faster answers.

How to Display Splunk Skills on Your Resume

4. Nessus

Nessus scans systems and networks for vulnerabilities, configuration drift, and compliance gaps. It’s a flashlight for hidden weaknesses.

Why It's Important

Consistent scanning reveals what patch cycles miss and where misconfigurations quietly grow teeth. Early visibility lowers risk.

How to Improve Nessus Skills

Make scanning accurate, fast, and useful:

1. Credentialed scans first: Prefer authenticated checks via SSH, SMB, WMI. You’ll get fewer false positives and deeper results.

2. Tune policies: Safe checks, scan windows, throttling, exclusions for fragile systems, and differential scans for speed.

3. Keep plugins fresh: Auto-update and review notable plugin changes so detections track emerging CVEs.

4. Segment by risk: Group assets, tag critical systems, and apply tailored policies rather than one-size-fits-all scanning.

5. Close the loop: Track remediation SLAs, validate fixes, and document accepted risk with expiration dates.

6. Integrate the stack: Pair with Tenable.sc, Tenable.io, or Tenable One for rollups, trend analysis, and cloud/agent coverage.

7. Scan the modern surface: Include containers, cloud instances, ephemeral assets, and remote endpoints via agents.

Good hygiene plus smart scheduling beats noisy reports every time.

How to Display Nessus Skills on Your Resume

5. SIEM

SIEM aggregates, correlates, and analyzes security data from across the enterprise to surface threats and prove compliance.

Why It's Important

It creates one pane of truth. Alerts get context, incidents get timelines, auditors get evidence.

How to Improve SIEM Skills

Engineer the signal, crush the noise:

1. Curate log sources: Prioritize identity, endpoint, network, and cloud control-plane logs. Normalize and timestamp consistently.

2. Detection engineering: Map to MITRE ATT&CK, use Sigma or equivalent patterns, and test rules with atomic simulations.

3. Threat intel done right: Pull in high-fidelity feeds, de-duplicate IOCs, expire stale indicators, and enrich only where it helps.

4. Behavior analytics: Add UEBA to catch low-and-slow activity and privilege creep.

5. Automate: Wire SOAR playbooks for triage, enrichment, and common containment steps. Humans handle the hard calls.

6. Measure health: Track ingestion lag, dropped events, storage retention, and rule performance. Fix bottlenecks fast.

7. Lifecycle management: Review false positives, tune thresholds, and retire rules that don’t earn their keep.

A lean, tuned SIEM turns telemetry into decisions.

How to Display SIEM Skills on Your Resume

6. AWS

AWS is a vast cloud platform with building blocks for compute, storage, networking, identity, and security. It scales quickly—and mistakes do too.

Why It's Important

Security in AWS is shared. Knowing the guardrails, controls, and logging options lets you prevent misconfigurations and catch trouble early.

How to Improve AWS Skills

Anchor on least privilege and visibility:

1. Identity first: Use IAM roles, permission boundaries, and service control policies in AWS Organizations. Enforce MFA and strong conditional access via IAM Identity Center.

2. Encrypt by default: KMS keys with tight key policies, envelope encryption, S3 Block Public Access, EBS and RDS encryption, TLS everywhere.

3. Turn on the lights: Organization CloudTrail, AWS Config with conformance packs, VPC Flow Logs, and centralized log archives.

4. Detect and respond: GuardDuty for threats, Security Hub for posture, Detective for investigations, plus EventBridge rules for automation.

5. Harden networks: Thoughtful VPC design, security groups over NACLs where possible, private subnets, PrivateLink, WAF, and Shield Advanced where warranted.

6. Continuous assessment: Inspector v2 for EC2/ECR/ECS, Patch Manager for cadence, ECR image scanning, and CI/CD checks before deploy.

7. Modern workloads: EKS with IRSA, pod security controls, secure SSM Session Manager access, and least-privilege Lambda roles.

8. Governance: Tagging standards, budget alarms, drift detection, and automated remediation for high-risk misconfigurations.

Good AWS security is mostly discipline and good defaults.

How to Display AWS Skills on Your Resume

7. Azure

Azure delivers cloud services across compute, storage, identity, and analytics. Security lives in the seams—identity, policy, networks, and monitoring.

Why It's Important

Done right, Azure’s native controls protect data and access at scale. Done wrong, small missteps snowball.

How to Improve Azure Skills

Use current names and current practices:

1. Identity and access: Microsoft Entra ID with MFA and Conditional Access. Use Privileged Identity Management, access reviews, and Just-in-Time elevation.

2. Network security: NSGs and ASGs, Azure Firewall, DDoS Protection, Private Endpoints, and careful egress control.

3. Data protection: Storage Service Encryption, Azure Disk Encryption, SQL TDE, and Key Vault or Managed HSM for keys and secrets.

4. Threat protection: Microsoft Defender for Cloud for hardening and threat detection; enable relevant Defender plans per resource.

5. Logging and SIEM: Azure Monitor and Log Analytics for telemetry; Microsoft Sentinel for analytics, detections, and automation.

6. Governance and compliance: Azure Policy with initiatives at scale, landing zones, and IaC (Bicep/Terraform) to enforce standards.

Review recommendations regularly; fix drift before it becomes debt.

How to Display Azure Skills on Your Resume

8. Firewall Management

Firewall management means crafting, maintaining, and monitoring policies that block the bad and permit the business. Rules, updates, logs, resilience—the whole lifecycle.

Why It's Important

It’s one of the last lines. Good policy cuts risk from the outset; bad policy hides gaps in plain sight.

How to Improve Firewall Management Skills

Make it clean, fast, and resilient:

1. Patch and upgrade: Keep firmware and signatures current; plan maintenance windows and keep rollback paths ready.

2. Policy hygiene: Recertify rules, remove stale entries, use objects and groups, and detect shadowed or duplicate rules.

3. Least privilege at the edge: Tight egress control, app-aware rules where supported, and TLS inspection where lawful and necessary.

4. Access control: RBAC for admins, MFA for changes, and strong change management with approvals and audits.

5. Visibility: Centralize logs to your SIEM, build alerts for policy changes and deny spikes, and baseline throughput.

6. High availability: Redundant pairs, synchronized state, configuration backups, and out-of-band management.

7. Automate safely: Use APIs or Ansible for repeatable changes, pre-checks, and rollbacks. No ad-hoc edits in production paths.

Simple policies are faster, safer, and easier to prove compliant.

How to Display Firewall Management Skills on Your Resume

9. Cryptography

Cryptography locks data and proves identity. Confidentiality, integrity, authenticity—delivered with math and careful engineering.

Why It's Important

Everything from login prompts to backups to invoices depends on it. Get crypto wrong and the rest collapses.

How to Improve Cryptography Skills

Favor proven patterns and planned upgrades:

1. Use modern standards: TLS 1.2+ (prefer 1.3), AEAD ciphers, PFS, no SHA‑1, no weak RSA keys. Enforce HSTS where appropriate.

2. Key management: Strong key policies, rotation, separation of duties, HSMs or KMS, wrapped keys (envelope encryption), and airtight secrets handling.

3. Implementation safety: Constant-time operations, safe random number generation, no homebrew crypto. Prefer well-vetted libraries like libsodium or equivalent.

4. Certificate lifecycle: Automate issuance and renewal, monitor expiry, and pin cautiously. Keep CRLs/OCSP in mind for revocation.

5. Prepare for PQC: Track NIST’s post-quantum selections such as ML‑KEM (Kyber) and ML‑DSA (Dilithium). Plan an inventory and migration path.

6. Design in security: Add crypto at the architecture stage—data classification, threat models, and access patterns guide choices.

Strong cryptography is more process and discipline than code volume.

How to Display Cryptography Skills on Your Resume

10. Blockchain

Blockchain is a distributed ledger that records transactions immutably across many nodes. Cryptography underpins integrity and resistance to tampering.

Why It's Important

For the right use cases, it strengthens integrity, provenance, and auditability. But it’s not pixie dust—threats move up the stack to keys, smart contracts, and bridges.

How to Improve Blockchain Skills

Focus on real risks and safe engineering:

1. Cryptographic soundness: Track algorithm choices, key lengths, and potential quantum impacts; build upgrade paths.

2. Security audits: Regular reviews of nodes, wallets, and infrastructure. Threat model bridges, oracles, and RPC endpoints.

3. Consensus and configuration: Tune parameters to balance security and performance; monitor for forks and validator health.

4. Smart contract safety: Use vetted libraries, rigorous testing, fuzzing, static analysis, and formal verification where warranted.

5. Layered defenses: Transaction monitoring, access controls, network segmentation, and hardware-backed key custody.

6. Privacy features: Consider zero-knowledge designs where confidentiality matters; understand the tradeoffs.

7. Community vigilance: Follow advisories, incidents, and disclosures. Patch quickly and rotate keys when in doubt.

Treat blockchain like any other critical system: with skepticism, controls, and tests.

How to Display Blockchain Skills on Your Resume

11. Incident Response

Incident Response is the discipline of preparing for, detecting, containing, eradicating, and learning from security events—fast and repeatable.

Why It's Important

When the clock is burning, process beats panic. Good IR limits damage, cuts downtime, and turns chaos into action.

How to Improve Incident Response Skills

Anchor to proven guidance and relentless practice:

1. Write a real plan: Roles, communication trees, decision authority, evidence handling, and vendor call lists. Base it on NIST SP 800‑61.

2. Detect and triage: SIEM, EDR, and cloud telemetry feeding playbooks that enrich automatically. Classify severity consistently.

3. Contain with precision: Isolate hosts, revoke tokens, block IOCs, and enable network controls without breaking recovery paths.

4. Eradicate and recover: Reimage when needed, rotate credentials, patch root causes, and restore from tested, immutable backups.

5. Tabletop and drill: Ransomware, BEC, insider, cloud credential leak—practice quarterly. Measure mean time to detect and respond.

6. After-action: Root cause, lessons learned, control gaps, and improvements with owners and deadlines. Update playbooks immediately.

7. Know the rules: Regulatory notifications, law enforcement engagement, and contractual timelines—no surprises.

Prepared teams move calmly and decisively; unprepared teams improvise at the worst possible time.

How to Display Incident Response Skills on Your Resume

12. Penetration Testing

Penetration testing simulates adversaries to uncover weaknesses before the real ones arrive. It’s controlled, scoped, and evidence-driven.

Why It's Important

You can’t fix what you can’t find. Pen tests expose vulnerable paths, risky defaults, and assumptions that don’t hold in the wild.

How to Improve Penetration Testing Skills

Blend methodology with relentless practice:

1. Study frameworks: PTES, OSSTMM, and OWASP guidance for web and API testing. Follow a method, then adapt.

2. Build hands-on skill: Practice against labs and CTFs. Keep a journal of findings, payloads, and bypasses that worked (and failed).

3. Master core tools: Nmap, Burp Suite, Metasploit, Wireshark, BloodHound, and cloud-native assessors. Know when manual beats automated.

4. Specialize: Web and API, AD/Entra, cloud (AWS/Azure), mobile, containers/Kubernetes. Depth beats dabbling.

5. Exploit responsibly: Define scope, get written authorization, protect data, and coordinate remediation with stakeholders.

6. Certs and community: OSCP, CEH, or equivalents help show rigor. Share research, read write-ups, and keep pace with new techniques.

7. Report like a pro: Clear impact statements, reproducible steps, and prioritized fixes with compensating controls where needed.

The goal isn’t exploits for their own sake—it’s safer systems.

How to Display Penetration Testing Skills on Your Resume