Cybersecurity Skills for AI Agents

A collection of cybersecurity skills for AI coding agents. The AI does the heavy lifting; you bring the context about your stack and your priorities.

Built to be useful at every experience level:

• Security engineers and pentesters running formal audits — concrete grep patterns, OWASP / NIST / ATT&CK alignment, report templates that pass auditor review
• Developers shipping safer code without a dedicated security team to lean on — security work that fits into a normal sprint, plain-English explanations of why each finding matters
• Founders, ops folks, and small-team operators securing a stack they can't afford a CISO for — guided, opinionated playbooks for the most common security work, with the audit skill explaining what it found and why
• Red / blue / purple teams running real engagements — offensive recon, web pentest, threat hunting, detection engineering, SOC operations

You do not need to be a security expert to use these skills. The skills are written so the AI agent can run them end-to-end and explain the findings in language any technical reader can follow. If you can describe what you have and what you want to know about it, the agent can do the work.

Skills are authored as Claude Code SKILL.md files (the canonical format) and built into adapters for Cursor and Codex. Installable via npx skills or the Claude Code plugin marketplace.

Built by Bri Russell. I run real audits with these skills, then bring the gaps I find back into the skill itself — so each version is a little less opinion and a little more evidence.

Contributions welcome! Field feedback is the most valuable contribution — whether you're a security engineer who hit a gap during an audit, a developer whose AI agent missed something obvious, or a founder who used a skill and got an answer that wasn't quite right. Open a PR or open an issue — every level of expertise produces useful signal.

Where to start

Not every skill is for every user on day one. A good starting point by context:

• Reviewing your own code or product: start with owasp-audit for the source-code sweep, then api-audit if you have API endpoints, then dependency-audit for the CVE pass
• Securing cloud / infrastructure: start with cloud-audit (AWS / GCP / Azure misconfig), then iam-audit if you manage identities, then container-audit if you run Docker / Kubernetes
• Responding to "something happened": incident-triage for the immediate response, disk-forensics if you need to analyze a system afterward, security-comms to draft the stakeholder / customer communications
• Building a security program from scratch: csf-mapping for the governance frame, threat-modeling before new features, breach-patterns to learn from public incidents
• Working under a specific regulation: privacy-engineering for GDPR / CCPA / similar privacy laws, hipaa-audit for ePHI, pci-audit for payment cards, ai-risk-management for AI features
• Closing the loop on findings: finding-triage for any single finding from any source — gives you a defensible disposition with the right ticket fields
• Translating security work upward or outward: security-comms for board / exec / customer / engineering / sales-engineering deliverables

The offensive skills (recon, osint-recon, web-pentest, red-team-engagement) require explicit authorization for the target and assume more security context. They open with an authorization check and will refuse anything ambiguous. red-team-engagement in particular carries the strongest refusal posture in the catalog and will refuse to plan anything against systems the user cannot demonstrate authorization for.

What are Skills?

Skills are markdown files that give AI agents specialized knowledge and workflows for specific tasks. Drop them into your project and your agent recognizes when you're working on a security task and applies the right methodology — OWASP categories, NIST IR steps, MITRE ATT&CK references, the actual grep patterns that surface the bug.

The goal isn't to replace a security engineer — or to pretend you have one if you don't. It's to give the agent enough structure that the first pass is useful, the report format is consistent, and the obvious stuff stops slipping through. For teams without dedicated security headcount, that closes a real gap. For teams with security engineers, it lets them spend their time on the work the AI can't do.

How Skills Work Together

The skills are organized into seven families. Most security work crosses families — an OWASP audit surfaces a dependency question, an incident kicks off an OSINT trail, cloud findings overlap with appsec, and findings have to be translated for the audience that hears them. Skills cross-reference each other where that's true; finding-triage, security-comms, and csf-mapping orchestrate across the whole map.

                    ┌──────────────────────────────────────────┐
                    │          Cybersecurity Skill Map         │
                    └──────────────────────┬───────────────────┘
                                           │
  ┌──────────┬──────────┬──────────┬───────┴────┬─────────┬──────────┬───────────┐
  ▼          ▼          ▼          ▼            ▼         ▼          ▼           ▼
┌──────┐ ┌────────┐ ┌────────┐ ┌────────┐ ┌──────┐ ┌─────────┐ ┌──────────┐
│AppSec│ │Offens. │ │Detect &│ │Cloud & │ │ AI   │ │Design & │ │Complianc │
│& Sup │ │& Recon │ │Respond │ │ Infra  │ │Secur.│ │Governnce│ │& Privacy │
├──────┤ ├────────┤ ├────────┤ ├────────┤ ├──────┤ ├─────────┤ ├──────────┤
│owasp-│ │recon   │ │incid-  │ │cloud-  │ │promp-│ │threat-  │ │privacy-  │
│ audit│ │osint-  │ │ triage │ │ audit  │ │ inj. │ │ modeling│ │ engineer-│
│api-  │ │ recon  │ │disk-   │ │contain-│ │ai-   │ │vuln-    │ │ ing      │
│ audit│ │web-    │ │ forens.│ │ audit  │ │ risk-│ │ research│ │pci-audit │
│depen-│ │ pentest│ │siem-   │ │iam-aud-│ │ mgmt │ │finding- │ │hipaa-    │
│ audit│ │red-    │ │ detect.│ │ it     │ │      │ │ triage  │ │ audit    │
│secre-│ │ team-  │ │soc-    │ │        │ │      │ │csf-     │ │          │
│ audit│ │ engage-│ │ ops    │ │        │ │      │ │ mapping │ │          │
│crypt-│ │ ment   │ │threat- │ │        │ │      │ │security-│ │          │
│ audit│ │        │ │ hunting│ │        │ │      │ │ comms   │ │          │
│mobile│ │        │ │breach- │ │        │ │      │ │         │ │          │
│-audit│ │        │ │patterns│ │        │ │      │ │         │ │          │
└──┬───┘ └───┬────┘ └───┬────┘ └───┬────┘ └──┬───┘ └────┬────┘ └────┬─────┘
   │         │          │          │         │           │            │
   └─────────┴────┬─────┴──────────┴─────────┴───────────┴────────────┘
                  │
   Common crossovers:
     owasp-audit ↔ api-audit ↔ dependency-audit ↔ vuln-research
     web-pentest ↔ recon ↔ osint-recon ↔ red-team-engagement
     siem-detection → threat-hunting → incident-triage → disk-forensics
     cloud-audit ↔ container-audit ↔ iam-audit ↔ secrets-audit
     threat-modeling → owasp-audit / api-audit (pre-implementation → code)
     prompt-injection ⇆ ai-risk-management (security slice ⇆ whole lifecycle)
     privacy-engineering ⇆ hipaa-audit / pci-audit (engineering ⇆ regulatory)
     breach-patterns → every audit skill (what to check)
     finding-triage ← every audit skill (closes the loop on any finding)
     security-comms ← every skill (translates output for non-security audience)
     csf-mapping ← every skill (rolls evidence into governance frame)

Available Skills

<!-- SKILLS:START -->

| Skill | What it does | |-------|--------------| | ai-risk-management | NIST AI Risk Management Framework + EU AI Act — model lifecycle governance, fairness, robustness, transparency, monitoring, third-party model risk. Broader than prompt-injection. | | api-audit | OWASP API Security Top 10 (2023) — REST / GraphQL / RPC endpoint audit. BOLA, mass assignment, BFLA, rate-limit, GraphQL introspection, webhook signature. | | breach-patterns | Preemptive hardening — read public breach disclosures, extract the audit question each one implies, check your stack. Capital One / LastPass / Okta / Snowflake / MOVEit / Codecov / Equifax / Uber. | | cloud-audit | AWS / GCP / Azure infrastructure misconfiguration, excessive IAM, public exposure, compliance gaps. | | container-audit | Docker + Kubernetes audit. Dockerfile, base images, pod security, RBAC, NetworkPolicy, secrets, image policy, runtime. | | crypto-audit | Cryptography implementation review — algorithm/mode choice, KDF parameters, IV/nonce handling, authenticated encryption, signature verification, randomness, TLS posture, key lifecycle. Deeper than owasp-audit A02. | | csf-mapping | NIST CSF 2.0 posture assessment — Govern / Identify / Protect / Detect / Respond / Recover. Subcategory mapping, current/target tiers, prioritized roadmap. Translates technical findings into governance language. | | dependency-audit | Dependencies, frameworks, runtimes, toolchain — CVEs, security anti-patterns, supply chain risk. | | disk-forensics | Disk image analysis, evidence recovery, timeline reconstruction. Explicit Authorization Check covering lawful basis, chain of custody, privacy scope. | | finding-triage | Single-finding disposition workflow — Fixed / Deferred / Accepted Risk / False Positive, with ticket-ready writeup templates and required-field enforcement. Closes the loop on every audit skill. | | [hi