#data science manager certification | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

charseraph · 4 months ago

Text

Noosciocircus agent backgrounds, former jobs at C&A, assigned roles, and current internal status.

Kinger

Former professor — Studied child psychology and computer science, moved into neobotanics via germination theory and seedlet development.

Seedlet trainer — Socialized and educated newly germinated seedlets to suit their future assignments. I.e. worked alongside a small team to serve as seedlets’ social parents, K-12 instructors, and upper-education mentors in rapid succession (about a year).

Intermediary — Inserted to assist cooperation and understanding of Caine.

Partially mentally mulekicked — Lives in state of forgetfulness after abstraction of spouse, is prone to reliving past from prior to event.

Ragatha

Former EMT — Worked in a rural community.

Semiohazard medic — Underwent training to treat and assess mulekick victims and to administer care in the presence of semiohazards.

Nootic health supervisor— Inserted to provide nootic endurance training, treat psychological mulekick, and maintain morale.

Obsessive-compulsive — Receives new agents and struggles to maintain morale among team and herself due to low trust in her honesty.

Jax

Former programmer — Gained experience when acquired out of university by a large software company.

Scioner — Developed virtual interfaces for seedlets to operate machinery with.

Circus surveyor �� Inserted to assess and map nature of circus simulation, potentially finding avenues of escape.

Anomic — Detached from morals and social stake. Uncooperative and gleefully combative.

Gangle

Former navy sailor — Performed clerical work as a yeoman, served in one of the first semiotically-armed submarines.

Personnel manager — Recordkept C&A researcher employments and managed mess hall.

Task coordinator — Inserted to organize team effort towards escape.

Reclused — Abandoned task and lives in quiet, depressive state.

Zooble

No formal background — Onboarded out of secondary school for certification by C&A as part of a youth outreach initiative.

Mule trainer — Physically handled mules, living semiohazard conveyors for tactical use.

Semiohazard specialist — Inserted to identify, evaluate, and attempt to disarm semiotic tripwires.

Debilitated and self-isolating — Suffers chronic vertigo from randomly pulled avatar. Struggles to participate in adventures at risk of episode.

Pomni

Former accountant — Worked for a chemical research firm before completing her accreditation to become a biochemist.

Collochemist — Performed mesh checkups and oversaw industrial hormone synthesis.

Field researcher — Inserted to collect data from fellows and organize reports for indeterminate recovery. Versed in scientific conduct.

In shock — Currently acclimating to new condition. Fresh and overwhelming preoccupation with escape.

Caine

Neglected — Due to project deadline tightening, Caine’s socialization was expedited in favor of lessons pertinent to his practical purpose. Emerged a well-meaning but awkward and insecure individual unprepared for noosciocircus entrapment.

Prototype — Germinated as an experimental mustard, or semiotic filter seedlet, capable of subconsciously assembling semiohazards and detonating them in controlled conditions.

Nooscioarchitect — Constructs spaces and nonsophont AI for the agents to occupy and interact with using his asset library and computation power. Organizes adventures to mentally stimulate the agents, unknowingly lacing them with hazards.

Helpless — After semiohazard overexposure, an agent’s attachment to their avatar dissolves and their blackroom exposes, a process called abstraction. These open holes in the noosciocircus simulation spill potentially hazardous memories and emotion from the abstracted agent’s mind. Caine stores them in the cellar, a stimulus-free and infoproofed zone that calms the abstracted and nullifies emitted hazards. He genuinely cares about the inserted, but after only being able to do damage control for a continually deteriorating situation, the weight of his failure is beginning to weigh on him in a way he did not get to learn how to express.

#the amazing digital circus #noosciocircus #char speaks #digital circus #tadc Kinger #tadc Ragatha #tadc Jax #tadc gangle #tadc zooble #tadc Pomni #tadc caine #bad ending #sophont ai

233 notes · View notes

mostlysignssomeportents · 1 year ago

Text

Demon-haunted computers are back, baby

Catch me in Miami! I'll be at Books and Books in Coral Gables on Jan 22 at 8PM.

As a science fiction writer, I am professionally irritated by a lot of sf movies. Not only do those writers get paid a lot more than I do, they insist on including things like "self-destruct" buttons on the bridges of their starships.

Look, I get it. When the evil empire is closing in on your flagship with its secret transdimensional technology, it's important that you keep those secrets out of the emperor's hand. An irrevocable self-destruct switch there on the bridge gets the job done! (It has to be irrevocable, otherwise the baddies'll just swarm the bridge and toggle it off).

But c'mon. If there's a facility built into your spaceship that causes it to explode no matter what the people on the bridge do, that is also a pretty big security risk! What if the bad guy figures out how to hijack the measure that – by design – the people who depend on the spaceship as a matter of life and death can't detect or override?

I mean, sure, you can try to simplify that self-destruct system to make it easier to audit and assure yourself that it doesn't have any bugs in it, but remember Schneier's Law: anyone can design a security system that works so well that they themselves can't think of a flaw in it. That doesn't mean you've made a security system that works – only that you've made a security system that works on people stupider than you.

I know it's weird to be worried about realism in movies that pretend we will ever find a practical means to visit other star systems and shuttle back and forth between them (which we are very, very unlikely to do):

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/09/astrobezzle/#send-robots-instead

But this kind of foolishness galls me. It galls me even more when it happens in the real world of technology design, which is why I've spent the past quarter-century being very cross about Digital Rights Management in general, and trusted computing in particular.

It all starts in 2002, when a team from Microsoft visited our offices at EFF to tell us about this new thing they'd dreamed up called "trusted computing":

https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/05/trusting-trust/#thompsons-devil

The big idea was to stick a second computer inside your computer, a very secure little co-processor, that you couldn't access directly, let alone reprogram or interfere with. As far as this "trusted platform module" was concerned, you were the enemy. The "trust" in trusted computing was about other people being able to trust your computer, even if they didn't trust you.

So that little TPM would do all kinds of cute tricks. It could observe and produce a cryptographically signed manifest of the entire boot-chain of your computer, which was meant to be an unforgeable certificate attesting to which kind of computer you were running and what software you were running on it. That meant that programs on other computers could decide whether to talk to your computer based on whether they agreed with your choices about which code to run.

This process, called "remote attestation," is generally billed as a way to identify and block computers that have been compromised by malware, or to identify gamers who are running cheats and refuse to play with them. But inevitably it turns into a way to refuse service to computers that have privacy blockers turned on, or are running stream-ripping software, or whose owners are blocking ads:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/02/self-incrimination/#wei-bai-bai

After all, a system that treats the device's owner as an adversary is a natural ally for the owner's other, human adversaries. The rubric for treating the owner as an adversary focuses on the way that users can be fooled by bad people with bad programs. If your computer gets taken over by malicious software, that malware might intercept queries from your antivirus program and send it false data that lulls it into thinking your computer is fine, even as your private data is being plundered and your system is being used to launch malware attacks on others.

These separate, non-user-accessible, non-updateable secure systems serve a nubs of certainty, a remote fortress that observes and faithfully reports on the interior workings of your computer. This separate system can't be user-modifiable or field-updateable, because then malicious software could impersonate the user and disable the security chip.

It's true that compromised computers are a real and terrifying problem. Your computer is privy to your most intimate secrets and an attacker who can turn it against you can harm you in untold ways. But the widespread redesign of out computers to treat us as their enemies gives rise to a range of completely predictable and – I would argue – even worse harms. Building computers that treat their owners as untrusted parties is a system that works well, but fails badly.

First of all, there are the ways that trusted computing is designed to hurt you. The most reliable way to enshittify something is to supply it over a computer that runs programs you can't alter, and that rats you out to third parties if you run counter-programs that disenshittify the service you're using. That's how we get inkjet printers that refuse to use perfectly good third-party ink and cars that refuse to accept perfectly good engine repairs if they are performed by third-party mechanics:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/24/rent-to-pwn/#kitt-is-a-demon

It's how we get cursed devices and appliances, from the juicer that won't squeeze third-party juice to the insulin pump that won't connect to a third-party continuous glucose monitor:

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/01/unauthorized-bread-a-near-future-tale-of-refugees-and-sinister-iot-appliances/

But trusted computing doesn't just create an opaque veil between your computer and the programs you use to inspect and control it. Trusted computing creates a no-go zone where programs can change their behavior based on whether they think they're being observed.

The most prominent example of this is Dieselgate, where auto manufacturers murdered hundreds of people by gimmicking their cars to emit illegal amount of NOX. Key to Dieselgate was a program that sought to determine whether it was being observed by regulators (it checked for the telltale signs of the standard test-suite) and changed its behavior to color within the lines.

Software that is seeking to harm the owner of the device that's running it must be able to detect when it is being run inside a simulation, a test-suite, a virtual machine, or any other hallucinatory virtual world. Just as Descartes couldn't know whether anything was real until he assured himself that he could trust his senses, malware is always questing to discover whether it is running in the real universe, or in a simulation created by a wicked god:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/07/28/descartes-was-an-optimist/#uh-oh

That's why mobile malware uses clever gambits like periodically checking for readings from your device's accelerometer, on the theory that a virtual mobile phone running on a security researcher's test bench won't have the fidelity to generate plausible jiggles to match the real data that comes from a phone in your pocket:

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/01/google-play-malware-used-phones-motion-sensors-to-conceal-itself/

Sometimes this backfires in absolutely delightful ways. When the Wannacry ransomware was holding the world hostage, the security researcher Marcus Hutchins noticed that its code made reference to a very weird website: iuqerfsodp9ifjaposdfjhgosurijfaewrwergwea.com. Hutchins stood up a website at that address and every Wannacry-infection in the world went instantly dormant:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/10/flintstone-delano-roosevelt/#the-matrix

It turns out that Wannacry's authors were using that ferkakte URL the same way that mobile malware authors were using accelerometer readings – to fulfill Descartes' imperative to distinguish the Matrix from reality. The malware authors knew that security researchers often ran malicious code inside sandboxes that answered every network query with fake data in hopes of eliciting responses that could be analyzed for weaknesses. So the Wannacry worm would periodically poll this nonexistent website and, if it got an answer, it would assume that it was being monitored by a security researcher and it would retreat to an encrypted blob, ceasing to operate lest it give intelligence to the enemy. When Hutchins put a webserver up at iuqerfsodp9ifjaposdfjhgosurijfaewrwergwea.com, every Wannacry instance in the world was instantly convinced that it was running on an enemy's simulator and withdrew into sulky hibernation.

The arms race to distinguish simulation from reality is critical and the stakes only get higher by the day. Malware abounds, even as our devices grow more intimately woven through our lives. We put our bodies into computers – cars, buildings – and computers inside our bodies. We absolutely want our computers to be able to faithfully convey what's going on inside them.

But we keep running as hard as we can in the opposite direction, leaning harder into secure computing models built on subsystems in our computers that treat us as the threat. Take UEFI, the ubiquitous security system that observes your computer's boot process, halting it if it sees something it doesn't approve of. On the one hand, this has made installing GNU/Linux and other alternative OSes vastly harder across a wide variety of devices. This means that when a vendor end-of-lifes a gadget, no one can make an alternative OS for it, so off the landfill it goes.

It doesn't help that UEFI – and other trusted computing modules – are covered by Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which makes it a felony to publish information that can bypass or weaken the system. The threat of a five-year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine means that UEFI and other trusted computing systems are understudied, leaving them festering with longstanding bugs:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/09/free-sample/#que-viva

Here's where it gets really bad. If an attacker can get inside UEFI, they can run malicious software that – by design – no program running on our computers can detect or block. That badware is running in "Ring -1" – a zone of privilege that overrides the operating system itself.

Here's the bad news: UEFI malware has already been detected in the wild:

https://securelist.com/cosmicstrand-uefi-firmware-rootkit/106973/

And here's the worst news: researchers have just identified another exploitable UEFI bug, dubbed Pixiefail:

https://blog.quarkslab.com/pixiefail-nine-vulnerabilities-in-tianocores-edk-ii-ipv6-network-stack.html

Writing in Ars Technica, Dan Goodin breaks down Pixiefail, describing how anyone on the same LAN as a vulnerable computer can infect its firmware:

https://arstechnica.com/security/2024/01/new-uefi-vulnerabilities-send-firmware-devs-across-an-entire-ecosystem-scrambling/

That vulnerability extends to computers in a data-center where the attacker has a cloud computing instance. PXE – the system that Pixiefail attacks – isn't widely used in home or office environments, but it's very common in data-centers.

Again, once a computer is exploited with Pixiefail, software running on that computer can't detect or delete the Pixiefail code. When the compromised computer is queried by the operating system, Pixiefail undetectably lies to the OS. "Hey, OS, does this drive have a file called 'pixiefail?'" "Nope." "Hey, OS, are you running a process called 'pixiefail?'" "Nope."

This is a self-destruct switch that's been compromised by the enemy, and which no one on the bridge can de-activate – by design. It's not the first time this has happened, and it won't be the last.

There are models for helping your computer bust out of the Matrix. Back in 2016, Edward Snowden and bunnie Huang prototyped and published source code and schematics for an "introspection engine":

https://assets.pubpub.org/aacpjrja/AgainstTheLaw-CounteringLawfulAbusesofDigitalSurveillance.pdf

This is a single-board computer that lives in an ultraslim shim that you slide between your iPhone's mainboard and its case, leaving a ribbon cable poking out of the SIM slot. This connects to a case that has its own OLED display. The board has leads that physically contact each of the network interfaces on the phone, conveying any data they transit to the screen so that you can observe the data your phone is sending without having to trust your phone.

(I liked this gadget so much that I included it as a major plot point in my 2020 novel Attack Surface, the third book in the Little Brother series):

https://craphound.com/attacksurface/

We don't have to cede control over our devices in order to secure them. Indeed, we can't ever secure them unless we can control them. Self-destruct switches don't belong on the bridge of your spaceship, and trusted computing modules don't belong in your devices.

I'm Kickstarting the audiobook for The Bezzle, the sequel to Red Team Blues, narrated by @wilwheaton! You can pre-order the audiobook and ebook, DRM free, as well as the hardcover, signed or unsigned. There's also bundles with Red Team Blues in ebook, audio or paperback.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/17/descartes-delenda-est/#self-destruct-sequence-initiated

Image: Mike (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/stillwellmike/15676883261/

CC BY-SA 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/

#pluralistic #uefi #owner override #user override #jailbreaking #dmca 1201 #schneiers law #descartes #nub of certainty #self-destruct button #trusted computing #secure enclaves #drm #ngscb #next generation secure computing base #palladium #pixiefail #infosec

576 notes · View notes

kartikreddyblog · 9 months ago

Text

Managing Data Science Projects: Best Practices for PGDM Students

#Data Science #Data Science Management #Colleges in India #Top Colleges in India #Data Science Courses #Management #Colleges for Data Science #Data Visualization #Certification Courses

1 note · View note

yey56 · 9 months ago

Text

Villainous x reader that has had a lot of jobs and identities.

DR FLUG 🧪:

He is really curious about your life and how the hell have you managed to enter in so many jobs.

He has a lot of doctorates and has studied several science oriented careers so he's also happy that someone else has some extent qualifications.

Is honestly surprised about your stories. You once told him about working in a morgue as a mortuary assistant and how some paranormal activities happened around you.

You're his first option when he needs someone to substitute him in the lab or in any of his tasks because he knows that there's a high chance of you having already done it before.

Does not understand how you're still alive since most of your jobs have been either live threatening or just high risk.

He will never know the total of how many jobs you have done in the past. Whenever he thinks he already knows everything and that nothing can surprise him you come up with some new anecdotes about another one of your former jobs.

He once asked you if you really had all the qualifications needed for your jobs. You told him that in some jobs you had the qualifications but in others don't so you just lied and pretended (it went well because of your stupid good luck and you golden tongue 😛)

Sometimes you appear with new certificates of several different universities. Hes starting to suspect that you forged them.

You have many forged documents, he once checked your several passports and ID and in each one of them you have a different name and nationality. He's not sure why you haven't been caught yet.

But actually you have, it's just that you make new ones in another location so every police attempt to catch you after your obvious job negligences or some cases you have been accused of scamming are in vain because you keep fading.

He asks himself if you even are called what he calls you. And your answer always will be: we'll never know 🙂

Your experience gives him some calm because you have to have some experience in what you do so he trusts you to not make a havoc of everything you touch (unlike dementia).

Sometimes you two hang out studying something new or trying to teach each other something the other doesn't know. You exchange knowledge while sipping coffe and eating waffles 🥞🧇

Genuinely afraid that someday the justice system would be able to catch you.

Will always have an eye on you. He knows your a menace to his perfec organasation system.

Not gonna lie, the first time he was aware of your falsifying documet activities he was a little afraid you where going to try and use any kind of information against him.

Reader: Flug, whens your birthday

Flug: why? So you can look up my natal chart? So you can figure out my personal data?

Reader: ...So I know when to wish you a happy birthday

Flug:😧😶😶‍🌫️🫥

DEMENCIA 🦎:

You and her together are a really chaotic combination. Not recommended if you value your peace ✌️

Whenever she wants to mess with Flug or with BH she calls for you because you will know what to do in 99% of the time.

For example, she wants to play a prank on Flug but doesn't want him noticing her in the cameras. Then there you are to help her, you disconnect the camera system and somehow convince Flug it has happened out of the blue.

Basically you're the perfect accomplice for any crime she may want to commit.

Remember how I said Flug is starting to suspect that you forged your certificates. Well she bets on her life each one of them are fake, but since your strategy to play pretend always works shes not complaining. 🤗

LOVES to see (and try sometimes) your former uniforms. You have them all put away in your closet and each one of them is different from the last. Heck somehow you manage to get yourself a police uniform. 👮

You are the one making her false identities and forging her documents in case she needs them.

Her and Flug made a bet the she would never get a university degree and that the day she got one he would dress as a sheep (like the sheep jumpsuit Dipper form gravity falls got).

Well she came to you and you did not only forged her a degree, you decided that it would be funny AF to give her have a neurology degree.🧑‍🔬

Save to say that Flug passed out once she showed him the document. (You had a pretty good laugh with that)

I mean you're a pretty good team. A chaos agent and a great falsificator that's knows about everything. 💪

She will always have your back in any lie you have.

Like your telling Flug an obviously fake story about your mission with dementia in which you exagerate everything and while he looks at you doubting every word you say Dementia comes in and agrees with you, adding more shit to the lie.

You have so much fun with her and she's always in for whatever you have in mind. Save to say she's your favourite.🥰

She wants you to break in with her in some bank or prison and do the whole act of pretending to be there working only to then cause havoc and shouting down the security systems.

You joke around a lot, but sometimes the jokes get out of hand:

Dementia: Hey, you know what, I love murder mystery we should watch that.

Reader being absolutely honest for once: well for your information I've been a suspect in four murder cases 😌

Dem:😶

BLACK HAT 🎩

The vast experience is always welcome, the problem is that he has some doubts about the veracity of some of your capacities but as long as you can work well and not fuck up he's not going to scold you for forging documents or lying in the interview. 👍

Since you clearly have experience in falsifying documents he uses that to make false reports or false contracts to make future clients sign something shady.

Considering that you have worked in lots of fields he can use you for a lot of tasks. Need to restore a old paiting? There you are to do it. His snake pet is suddenly ill or with stomach issues? Worry not, you have worked at a zoo before.

And the list goes on a on. You never get bored there

Really appreciates the wit and the quick thinking you have because it's very useful in a lot of situations. Your just start talking with all of the confidence in the world even though you're probably telling the biggest lie human kind has ever witnessed. 🤫🫢

And the worst of all? It. fucking. works. Even though you seem to have no idea about something you manage to uphold a conversation pretending you know everything about it, and you can keep it up quite a while!!

You also always try to investigate about what you are trying to pretend to know about, just to stay safe.

He's probably the only one that know your real name. But the rest of the crew are always doubting which of your several identities you really are. 🥷

Also the fact that you can change your narrative and pretend to be a whole different person with a whole different life. He adores that, it's very useful for a villain to be able to know how to put an act and get away with it. 😶‍🌫️🫥

Thinks you're valuable to the organisation.

As well as dementia, hes also fully convinced that all of your certificates are false but he doesn't doubt that you have knowledge in those fields. He just thinks you forged the documents and thats it.

Will not believe your obvious exaggerated stories. You're not a reliable narrator since he knows your habit of twisting a little bit the reality or as you put it "selecting the truth".

He doesn't think your completely useless and since you have had lots of experiences in life you are somehow interesting. He feels pity for all of your former bosses, mostly because you confided him that the reason you had so many jobs is because in most of them you got fired. 😐😑

You're the nightmare of employers. 😚✌️

Somehow gets used to your shenanigans and already expects you to generate some kind of problematic situation.

BH, answering the phone: Hello?

Reader: It's reader.

BH: what did they do this time

Reader: No!, it's me, reader. It's actually me.

BH: what the hell did you do this time?! 😤🤬

Reader: it's not like I try to blow things up. It's just sort of happens. Though you've got to admit that the fire is fascinating 🔥

One of his favourites stories you told him was when you were working for an illegal organization that bringed back prehistoric animals to life with the purpose of the tourism of the rich folk.

You were fired because you shot down the security system because in your own words " I always wanted to see a diplodocus close" so since lots of life's were put in danger and some lost in that incident you were fired and sued for that.🦕

Of course you changed identities again and flew away from the place where this was taking place.

You never presented yourself at court. You're not only banned from entering that country but also you have an arrest notice. If you put a foot there you will face life sentence 🫠🙃

Kinda respects your ability to just go away and start a new whenever you go. But will not let you unsupervised.

5.0.5 🐻

Storytelling with him is a MUST.

you have told him so many stories about your past jobs and each one of them has a changed narrative by you but since he loves hearing stories he doesn't think much about it.

When Flug is busy he always asks you to help him with whatever he's doing.

He once catched restoring one of BH's paintings and also wanted to draw so he just brought a notebook next to where you were and stayed there with you.

He makes lots of drawing for you and you either hang them in your bedroom wall or put away in your drawer.

From time to time you gift him little things you have stolen from your former jobs. You worked at an acuarium? You give him a plushie of a whale you kept.

He's confused when you present yourlsef with other names, you have tried to explain it to him but it doesn't really stuck.

Really good listener, if you need to vent to someone it will sure be either him or Flug if you catch him relaxed enough.

Both of you have fun hanging out. You always tell random data about absolutely everything and he just sits there and listens to you.

#villainous #x reader #black hat #demencia #dr flug #villainous 505

66 notes · View notes

cyberstudious · 4 months ago

Note

Hey! This is very random, but I saw that you work in cyber security right now. I work in data science, but I'm really interested in cyber security and considering making a switch. I was wondering what kind of cybersecurity work you do, and what has been the most helpful for you to learn what you need for your job!

Hi! Cybersecurity is a really broad field, and you can do a lot of different things depending on what your interests are.

My work is mostly focused around automating things for security, since my background is in programming. Automation is really helpful for speeding up boring, monotonous tasks that need to get done, but don't necessarily need a human involved. A good example is automated phishing analysis, since phishing reports are a big chunk of the cases that security analysts have to deal with, and an analyst usually follows the same few steps at the beginning. Rather than someone having to manually check the reputation of the sender domain, check the reputation of any links, and all of that every single time, we can build tools to automatically scan for things like that and then present the info to the analyst. The whole idea here is to automate the boring data retrieval stuff, since computers are good at that, and give the analyst more time for decision-making and analysis, since humans are good at that.

If you're coming from data science, you might be interested in detection engineering. Cybersecurity is essentially a data problem - we have a ton of logs from a ton of different sources (internal logs, threat intelligence feeds, etc.) - how do we sort through that data to highlight things that we want to pay attention to, and how can we correlate events from different sources? If you're into software development or want to stay more on the data science side, maybe you could also look into roles for software development at companies that have SIEM (Security Information and Event Management) products - these are essentially the big log repositories that organizations rely on for correlation and alerting.

As for starting to learn security, my general go-to recommendation is to start looking through the material for the Security+ certification. For better or worse, certifications are pretty big in security, much more so than other tech fields (to my knowledge). I'm a bit more hesitant to recommend the Security+ now, since CompTIA (the company that offers it) was bought by a private equity company last year. Everyone is kind of expecting the prices to go up and the quality to go down. (The Security+ exam costs $404 USD as of writing this, and I think I took mine for like $135ish with a student discount in 2022). However, the Security+ is still the most well-known and comprehensive entry-level certification that I'm aware of. You can (and should) study for it completely for free - check out Professor Messer's training videos on YouTube. There are also plenty of books out there if that's more of your thing. I'd say to treat the Security+ as a way to get a broad overview of security and figure out what you don't know. (It's certainly not a magic ticket to a job, no matter what those expensive bootcamps will tell you.)

If you aren't familiar with networking, it's worth checking out Professor Messer's Network+ training videos as well. You don't need to know everything on there, but having an understanding of ports, protocols, and network components and design is super useful. I hear a lot that the best security folks are often the ones who come from IT or networking or similar and have a really solid understanding of the fundamentals and then get into security. Don't neglect the basics!

One thing that I'll also add, based on conversations I've had with folks in my network… getting a job in cybersecurity is harder now than it used to be, at least in the US (where I am). There are a ton of very well-qualified people who have been laid off who are now competing with people trying to get into the field in the first place, and with the wrecking ball that Elon is taking to the federal government (and by extension, government contractors) right now… it's hard. There's still a need for skilled folks in cyber, but you're going to run into a lot of those "5 years of experience required for this entry-level job" kind of job postings.

On a slightly happier note, another thing you should do if you want to get into cyber is to stay up to date with what's happening in the industry! I have a masterpost that has a section with some of my favorite news sources. The SANS Stormcast is a good place to start - it's a 5 minute podcast every weekday morning that covers most of the big things. Black Hills Infosec also does a weekly news livestream on YouTube that's similar (but longer and with more banter). Also, a lot of infosec folks hang out on Mastodon & in the wider fediverse. Let me know if you want some recs for folks to follow over there.

The nice thing about cybersecurity (and computer-related fields in general, I find) is that there are a ton of free resources out there to help you learn. Sometimes it's harder to find the higher-quality ones, but let me know if there are any topics you're interested in & I'll see what I can find. I have a few posts in my cybersecurity tag on here that might help.

Thank you for your patience, I know you sent this in over a week ago lol but life has been busy. Feel free to send any follow-up questions if you have any!

#asks #cybersecurity

10 notes · View notes