Five interns completed the program and earned a verified CyberDefenders Summer Internship 2026 credential.
Malware Copilot: AI-Assisted Reverse Engineering Lab
Merritt College · Sponsored by Delphos Labs
Secure the Mission: Nonprofit Security Assessment Lab
Merritt College · Sponsored by AllWomenCount
Trust but Verify: SOC 2 Audit Readiness
Cal State Los Angeles · Sponsored by Interlaced
Ghost Cloud: LLM Honeypots in AWS
VIT Chennai · Sponsored by Lib13 Inc
After the Hack: Incident Response & Threat Intel for Community Defenders
UNLV · Sponsored by SF Living Wage Coalition
More Interns Finishing Soon
A few more interns from this cohort are finishing final deliverables and will be added here once their credentials are verified. Interested in sponsoring or applying to a future cohort? Learn about the internship program.
A remote-first internship pairing students with mentors on focused, real-world cybersecurity projects.
Duration
10 weeks
Mid-June to late August 2026.
Format
Remote-first
Project-based work with mentorship and regular feedback.
Partners
Bay Area ecosystem
Growth Sector, Merritt College, and Bay Area employer & startup ecosystem partners.
Objective
Resume-quality deliverables
Practical, open-source tools, assessments, compliance artifacts, and research deliverables across project tracks.
Seven sponsor-backed project tracks made up the 2026 cohort. Every track has its own page with the full brief, workstreams, and expected deliverables.
Track 6
Sponsored by SF Living Wage Coalition
View TrackIn their own words — more from this cohort coming soon.
This summer, I gained hands-on experience in cybersecurity through an internship focused on security assessment and incident response — analyzing a real-world WordPress website compromise, researching attack vectors, and developing recommendations to improve the organization’s security posture. I built skills in incident timeline reconstruction, threat analysis, MITRE ATT&CK mapping, IOC identification, and security hardening, and learned how to communicate technical findings to non-technical stakeholders. I’m grateful to my mentors and everyone involved for the opportunity to learn, contribute, and grow this summer.
Andwele Reid · 2026 Cohort