Top 12 Security Agent Skills to Put on Your Resume

In today's high-stakes security landscape, a sharp stack of skills can tilt the balance. Hiring teams skim fast, threats move faster, and the resume that lands interviews signals fluency across tools and tactics. The twelve skills below don’t just pad a list—they prove you can handle the messy, modern reality of security work.

Security Agent Skills

1. CyberArk
2. Splunk
3. Nessus
4. Wireshark
5. Palo Alto
6. Fortinet
7. SIEM
8. Nmap
9. Kali Linux
10. Snort
11. Archer (formerly RSA Archer)
12. Qualys

1. CyberArk

CyberArk delivers privileged access management, vaulting secrets and controlling high-risk credentials so critical systems stay locked down and accountable.

Why It's Important

Privileged accounts are golden keys. CyberArk shrinks their attack surface, enforces least privilege, and records sensitive access so misuse can’t hide.

How to Improve CyberArk Skills

1. Stay current: Patch core components, plugins, and connectors quickly. Old versions leak risk.

2. Harden the vault: Enforce least privilege, rotate credentials often, and isolate components with tight network controls.

3. Automate: Use APIs and scripts for onboarding, rotations, and access workflows. Less manual work, fewer mistakes.

4. Strong auth: Require MFA, short-lived tokens, and just-in-time elevation where possible.

5. Watch everything: Turn on session recording, alert on anomalies, and audit use regularly.

6. Train the team: Admins and app owners need shared playbooks for break-glass, rotations, and access reviews.

How to Display CyberArk Skills on Your Resume

2. Splunk

Splunk ingests machine data at scale, letting security teams search, visualize, and correlate events for detection, investigation, and response.

Why It's Important

Speed and context win incidents. Splunk brings both—real-time visibility, historical depth, and flexible analytics that reveal patterns attackers hope you miss.

How to Improve Splunk Skills

1. Normalize data: Map logs to a common model for cleaner correlation and sharper detections.

2. Tune the noise: Prune chatty sources, refine field extractions, and throttle non-essential data.

3. Dashboards with intent: Build role-specific views for SOC, IR, and execs. Fast answers, fewer clicks.

4. Alert quality over quantity: Use risk-based scoring and correlation to cut false positives.

5. Scale smart: Right-size indexers, use search head clustering, and accelerate common searches.

6. Automate response: Tie alerts to playbooks and ticketing so action follows signal.

7. Keep pace: Regular upgrades, app updates, and content reviews to match evolving threats.

How to Display Splunk Skills on Your Resume

3. Nessus

Nessus is a vulnerability scanner that discovers, validates, and reports weaknesses across systems, networks, and applications.

Why It's Important

Unknown risk festers. Nessus illuminates it—quickly—so remediation can prioritize what truly matters.

How to Improve Nessus Skills

1. Update engines and plugins: Make new checks available as soon as they drop.

2. Use authenticated scans: Credentials unlock deeper checks and fewer false positives.

3. Tailor policies: Tune scans to asset types, maintenance windows, and bandwidth limits.

4. Deploy agents where needed: Cover roaming devices and segmented networks without punching risky holes.

5. Shift to continuous assessment: Scheduled scans plus agents, not one-and-done runs.

6. Integrate: Feed findings into ticketing, SIEM, and dashboards for measurable remediation.

7. Report with focus: Group by business service, severity, and exploitability to drive action.

How to Display Nessus Skills on Your Resume

4. Wireshark

Wireshark is a protocol analyzer for capturing and dissecting network traffic, invaluable for incident triage and deep-dive troubleshooting.

Why It's Important

Packets don’t lie. When logs get vague or noisy, Wireshark shows ground truth—flows, handshakes, payloads, timing.

How to Improve Wireshark Skills

1. Target your capture: Use capture and display filters to keep files small and focused.

2. Decrypt when allowed: Leverage TLS key logs and proper legal approvals to inspect encrypted sessions.

3. Craft custom dissectors: Handle proprietary protocols so analysis doesn’t stall.

4. Automate the boring bits: Batch process pcaps, extract indicators, and script repeatable checks.

5. Performance hygiene: Ring buffers, proper NICs, and write-to-disk settings prevent drops.

6. Practice: Build muscle memory on real pcaps—incident traces, malware traffic, oddball protocols.

How to Display Wireshark Skills on Your Resume

5. Palo Alto

Palo Alto Networks provides next-generation firewalls, cloud security, and endpoint protection that work together to block threats across environments.

Why It's Important

Threats pivot across endpoints, networks, and cloud. Palo Alto’s ecosystem closes gaps and enforces policy consistently.

How to Improve Palo Alto Skills

1. Keep content fresh: Signatures, DNS security, WildFire—update and verify they’re enforced.

2. Best-practice configs: App-ID and User-ID on, threat prevention profiles tight, logging exhaustive.

3. Segment ruthlessly: Least-trust zones, granular rules, and deny-by-default for east-west traffic.

4. Decrypt responsibly: Where policy permits, TLS decryption reveals buried threats.

5. Tie it together: Feed Cortex analytics, centralize logs, and automate responses with playbooks.

6. Review often: Rule cleanups, shadowed policy analysis, and regular BPA-style checks.

How to Display Palo Alto Skills on Your Resume

6. Fortinet

Fortinet offers firewalls, endpoint protection, VPN, IPS, and a security fabric to coordinate defenses across the stack.

Why It's Important

A broad toolset that speaks one language reduces blind spots and accelerates response when seconds count.

How to Improve Fortinet Skills

1. Harden and update: Current firmware, strict admin access, and locked-down management interfaces.

2. Exploit the fabric: Link firewalls, endpoints, and sandboxes so detections trigger action everywhere.

3. Zero trust by default: Identity-aware policies, MFA, and microsegmentation for critical apps.

4. Tune performance: Right-size inspection features, leverage hardware acceleration, and monitor latency.

5. Operationalize: Clear runbooks, alert routing to the right owners, and periodic tabletop drills.

6. Level up skills: Pursue NSE tracks and hands-on labs to sharpen deployment and troubleshooting.

How to Display Fortinet Skills on Your Resume

7. SIEM

SIEM aggregates and correlates logs from across your environment to detect, investigate, and respond to threats.

Why It's Important

It’s the nerve center: telemetry in, analytics applied, response out. Without it, visibility fractures.

How to Improve SIEM Skills

1. Collect with intention: Onboard high-value sources first. Normalize fields for clean correlation.

2. Cut the noise: Suppress benign patterns, adjust thresholds, and quarantine chronic false positives.

3. Enrich detections: Add context—asset criticality, user risk, known bad indicators—to sharpen alerts.

4. Use UEBA: Baselines and behavior analytics catch subtle insider and lateral moves.

5. Automate response: SOAR playbooks for quarantine, ticketing, and notifications to shrink MTTR.

6. Measure: Track detection coverage, dwell time, and alert quality. Iterate monthly.

7. Exercise the plan: Simulate incidents, verify runbooks, and tune correlation rules accordingly.

How to Display SIEM Skills on Your Resume

8. Nmap

Nmap discovers hosts and services, fingerprinting what’s alive and where it might be weak.

Why It's Important

You can’t defend what you can’t see. Nmap maps the territory—fast.

How to Improve Nmap Skills

1. Choose the right scan: Blend -sV (version), -sC (scripts), -O (OS), and -Pn (no ping) to fit scope and stealth.

2. Control speed: Use timing templates (-T0 to -T5) and rate limits to avoid disruption.

3. Use NSE wisely: Targeted scripts reveal misconfigurations and CVEs without blasting everything.

4. Segment work: Break big ranges into chunks; run parallel scans carefully to dodge congestion.

5. Mind the network: Exclude fragile systems, set host timeouts, and prefer SYN scans (root) for accuracy.

6. Log everything: Output to all formats (-oA) and compare diffs over time to spot drift.

How to Display Nmap Skills on Your Resume

9. Kali Linux

Kali Linux is a Debian-based distro loaded with tools for penetration testing, forensics, and red/blue team workflows.

Why It's Important

One platform, many disciplines. From recon to reporting, Kali speeds up the security craft.

How to Improve Kali Linux Skills

1. Keep it updated: sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y—frequently.

2. Harden the host: Enable AppArmor or SELinux, lock SSH, and disable unneeded services.

3. Firewall first: Turn on UFW, define tight inbound rules, and log drops. sudo ufw enable

4. Add detection: Run Suricata or Snort to watch the wire during engagements.

5. Isolate labs: Separate test networks from production; use snapshots to rollback quickly.

6. Backups matter: Automate with rsync; store off-box to avoid losing notes and loot.

7. Protect privacy: Route through a VPN; use Tor where policy allows and ethics require.

8. Curate tools: Install only what you need; keep core tools sharp and regularly refreshed.

How to Display Kali Linux Skills on Your Resume

10. Snort

Snort is an open-source intrusion detection and prevention engine that inspects traffic for signatures and anomalies. Snort 3 brings better performance and extensibility.

Why It's Important

Network visibility at the packet level—alerts when attacks happen, context when analysis begins.

How to Improve Snort Skills

1. Move to Snort 3: Improved pipelines, multi-threading, and rule flexibility pay dividends.

2. Customize rules: Prune noisy sigs, add environment-specific ones, and use thresholds/suppressions.

3. Tune for speed: Optimize DAQs, leverage RSS/affinity, and use BPF filters to narrow traffic.

4. Update often: Keep rule feeds fresh; threat actors don’t wait.

5. Integrate: Send alerts to SIEM, enrich with threat intel, and trigger SOAR playbooks.

6. Validate: Test with pcaps, run regression checks, and baseline expected traffic patterns.

How to Display Snort Skills on Your Resume

11. Archer (formerly RSA Archer)

Archer is an integrated risk management platform for tracking risks, controls, issues, and compliance across the enterprise.

Why It's Important

Fragmented risk data leads to surprises. Archer centralizes it, so decisions can be fast and defensible.

How to Improve Archer Skills

1. Model the program: Align applications to your processes—risk registers, issues, exceptions, third-party, and more.

2. Automate workflows: Notifications, escalations, and approvals keep tasks moving without manual chase-downs.

3. Integrate data: Pull in vulns, assets, and findings to tie technical risk to business impact.

4. Standardize taxonomies: Consistent risk scoring and control libraries (e.g., mapped to NIST/ISO) prevent chaos.

5. Dashboards that tell a story: KPIs, KRIs, and heat maps that leadership can read at a glance.

6. Govern updates: Routine content reviews and admin hygiene to avoid drift and clutter.

How to Display RSA Archer Skills on Your Resume

12. Qualys

Qualys provides cloud-based vulnerability management, policy compliance, and a lightweight agent for continuous assessment across endpoints and servers.

Why It's Important

Always-on visibility. Drift and exposure get flagged early, not months later.

How to Improve Qualys Skills

1. Keep agents current: Up-to-date components deliver better checks and fewer glitches.

2. Maximize coverage: Deploy across all tiers—workstations, servers, cloud workloads, and remote users.

3. Tune frequency: Balance scan schedules and agent intervals to match risk and business windows.

4. Use tags: Group assets by ownership, sensitivity, and environment to target policies and reports.

5. Integrate workflows: Pipe findings into ticketing and SIEM; track SLA-driven remediation.

6. Separate signal from noise: Focus on exploitable vulns and known ransomware vectors first.

7. Audit health: Regularly check agent status, gaps in coverage, and stale assets.

How to Display Qualys Skills on Your Resume