Sans Retraining

https://cyber-academy.co.uk/retraining

Just spreading the word!

This is a fantastic opportunity.

For anyone wanting to get into security and is able to pass the assessments needed to qualify, this will give you a good grounding and set you on the path of a fun career.

I very much enjoy working in security, so much to constantly learn, but this is what makes the whole experience fun.

Sans 503 Certified!

In what feels like a long time coming I passed the sans 503 exam today.  One thing I learned is that my index could have been better.  How I set it up and thought would help me, was not really the case.  I started off really well, being able to find and rely upon my index to help me out in the area’s I needed to check my books, just to confirm my answers.  30 questions in I’m at 96%, so far so good.  90 questions in 84% – still good at this point, more than half way I’m feeling confident and have about 2 hours left at this point.

Then I seemed to have several questions based on information I could not find in my index, and on area’s that are weaker for me, like DNS.  My impression was soon as it discovered a weaker area, you would be asked several questions in this area – at least that is how it felt.

If I had studied other sans exams before this one, I would have been able to create a better index and no doubt scored a better mark.  All things considered, this is my first certification in many years and I’m happy that I have passed with a 77%, not the score I was aiming for, but towards the end all I wanted to do was finish those questions and get out of there.

I have the 401 exam booked for 4 weeks time, I now need to create my index for this one, with it being an easier exam content wise, and now my experience gained from this one, I should hopefully be able to score very well.

Time will tell.

Hex and Binary

I intend to build up this guide into a series of more complex “lessons” so eventually we can read packets as they are on the wire and you will be able to interpret what you are seeing without too much difficulty.

Time to start with the basics.  In order to understand and read packets, we need to know the fundamentals.  How do computers and network communicate?  Essentially by binary and hexadecimal.  This is a series of zero’s and one’s and the numbers 0 to 9 with the letters A to F.

When I was taught this in school, some 20ish years ago, I honestly found it a bit complicated, but looking back it was only complicated due to the way it was taught.  Hopefully this methodolgy is simple for you to understand.

Counting in binary is not too difficult, the values can only be a 0 or a 1, an off or on value.  However what the off or on values represent is the important ‘bit’.

You essentially have 8 bits in a byte and this makes binary reasonably straight forward, for counting I find it best to create a quick table, this allows me to visually count, rarther than attempting to work out everything in my head.

binaryhexchart Continue reading “Hex and Binary”