Professor Messer's SY0-601 Security+ Study Group - February 2021

hi everybody welcome to the sy0 601 security plus study group pre-show we'll be getting started in 10 minutes we've got uh all security plus questions in this first hour and then i'll open up the phone lines in the second hour which reminds me that i need to start skype on this side we're on day two of uh two in a row we did a network plus study group yesterday and we're doing the security plus study group today we don't often do back to back back to back to back but here we are my schedule's just weird this month we have this month and next month so we got two this week this is the second of two and then next week is two next week or two a plus study groups but they're not back to back they are they are tuesday thursday so maybe not as as uh intense there's a lot that goes into kind of putting these together and i'm i'm kind of used to doing one a week and doing two days in a row just as uh very different very different that's okay we're good hey everybody is the 601 much harder or more material well more material would be harder wouldn't it so yes having to memorize 30 percent more material was already a big certification now let's do 30 percent more it's much bigger so yeah because it is much larger there's much more to memorize therefore it's from that perspective harder i don't think the difficulty level is is harder i don't think that's a higher difficulty level i think the difficulty level is still you're still at normal you didn't set the game to hard you're still at normal but now there's 10 more levels you have to go through there you go there's my my game comparison from that person like i don't know yes 30 percent it's big it's it's huge i did a video of um why you shouldn't wait to take the 601 because some people very early on we're saying oh i'm just going to wait i'll take the new version and i said you might not want to do that you might want to wait uh not wait and take the current version um you might be much better off you would be much better off there's no might about it you would be much better off so that's that's how that goes that's how that goes uh the 601 release was pretty quick though not unprecedented it was pretty it was late it wasn't quick it was like they pushed it because of covin so that's and then they did a much longer migration between the two so you can still take the 501 right now and you should 501 still good still available until july 31st you should take it if you can that's my recommendation that's what that video was about was if you have the choice between the 501 and 601 and passing either one of these gives you identically exactly the same result why wouldn't you take the 501 that just that doesn't even make sense why would you take the 601 and uh that doesn't mean some people won't some people will still take the 601 because reasons i don't know why they want to which is i can't argue with that sure go ahead knock yourself out and people have been they've been taking the 601 so do you think a guy could pass the 501 by studying hard really hard for a week no no i don't the average is three months now unless you already in the industry you've already been working with this technology you're already familiar with security you've already done these things then yeah you could do it in a week but if that's the case you probably don't need it right you probably don't need the certification maybe there was a reason you need the certification there are some organizations that require you to have it so if you were walking in with a background in i.t security then yeah you could but i i know people are taking the 601 they feel that it's the the one that they wanted to take well rock on you've still got some you know there's back in november when this was released there were no books there were no books until january that's last month when the first books came out so there's still much more 501 content out there until uh then there is 601 so you can take the 601 and you can pass a 601 but it's a you're at a disadvantage right there you had a disadvantage so yeah but the dod directive doesn't apply it doesn't doesn't discriminate over which certification exam you take it just wants security plus so you can take the 501 enter in your security plus or you can take the 601 and earn your security plus the end result is exactly the same because the certification itself the security plus certification doesn't have a version so you somebody seeing that your security plus certified you could have taken the 301 and simply renewed it over the last 10 years and still be security plus certified and still be able to apply that directive to it so that's it the scoring is exactly the same the structure of the exam is effectively the same you know that some of the topics are different they're in different order some of the things have different names now because that's the world we live in but i think overall the things they updated and changed weren't bad things they're just different they did kind of change the scope of the exam we can talk about this in the after show in much more detail they kind of changed the approach to security plus um a bit they tweaked it just a little bit the part that was surprising to me was the the amount of additional exam objectives they added they increased the size of the certification by 30 which is is just huge now it is remarkable it's surprising to me more people aren't mentioning this but it is it is such a bigger exam now much bigger it's sort of like both a plus exams combined together is now the size of security plus we're almost at the point where we could split this into different exams is that coming next would that be the next rev or maybe they figure out wow that was a lot of stuff maybe we shouldn't do that i don't get that impression after seeing presentations from comptia after seeing their what their approach was to creating the 601 um i didn't get the uh opinion from that that they were at all concerned with the size like of course we're going to make it bigger because it needs to be bigger i don't know that it needs to be bigger but it did but it is and i've just to give you an idea most of my courses things like network plus is 100 videos 101 videos something like that a plus is 55 60 videos a piece this 601 exam is going to be 176 videos and i'm already halfway through halfway through uh 176 videos for this course i don't know if that's necessary in fact there's quite a bit of content on the exam i personally don't feel is necessary but i understand where they're where they're coming from i understand why they put the content on there but when you make an exam that's everything to everyone this is sort of what you get it just keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger and that's sort of what they've created is an exam that's that's just big it's everything to everyone and i think the focus on security plus kind of the big customer of security plus is the federal government so that's it are you supposed to be in a discord or something to get the most out of this no we look at the back of my head for uh for an hour no we haven't started yet so you're in the right place you're here in the you're in the chat room there will be more than the back of my head in just a moment we will in one minute it's 11 59 in one minute we will start the study group so yes this is a very boring part where you get to hear me make sure that i'm recording recording is on uh video looks good up here you can kind of see my video set up so this these are the big ones this is the preview window and this is the window you see the program window and then the four underneath that are the four camera feeds that i give you during this so i check and make sure those are up those look good so i think we're good don't have a discord try to discord discord doesn't work for me for us uh there's a chat on my website already so uh divine in the the chatroom bought my network plus course notes yesterday after the study group thank you thank you for purchasing those it really does go a long way to keeping this craziness going and i i appreciate it hopefully it's uh valuable as well it's not you know there's more to it than just keeping the lights on i'm i think it really helps you with your studies well look at that it's top of the hour let's make sure that i got a green light on my keynote keynote keynote let's play that looks good it's time for study group everybody let's do this hello everyone welcome to the february 2021 professor messer sy-0601 security plus study group we have for you questions and answers today that come directly from the comptia exam objectives for the sy-0601 this is the the latest and greatest of security plus certifications we were just talking about that in the pre-show and everything that we're going to do today is all about security plus in this first hour i will ask you questions that come directly from those exam objectives in the second hour we have our after show which sometimes is longer than our normal show where i'll open up the phone lines you can call in you can ask questions in the chat room whatever you'd like to do it's easy enough to make that happen you if you are here live can participate live interactively on the internet so one of the ways you do this is you can pop open a new browser window and visit this link professormesser.com qa that is the link that will get a question on the screen right now that you can answer interactively there is also a mobile app you can use you're one of those people with your crazy smartphones you kids with your here's mine it's my crazy smartphone the socrative student app is what you want it's a really nice app this is the service we use is socrative so the app you want is the one for students there's a socrative teacher app that's the one for me you get the socratic student app and if you use that it will ask you for a room name the room name is professor messer all one word p-r-o-f-e-s-s-o-r-m-e-s-s-e-r so that is uh the name you need make sure you spell it right you don't spell it right then you are in trouble you've got you've got big problems if that's the case if you do all of that correctly there will be a question waiting for you and that question says which of the following is responsible for enforcing rules during a cyber security exercise and i have a number of options available that you will find is it the white team the purple team the red team or the blue team so this is one where if you are ever working through the details of an exam this is where you would we would start this is a question from last month and if you are watching this from last month we do this rewind question first to make sure people can get in and answer the question and so you should like put your answer in there as well uh please no answers in the chat room no hints in the chat room that's sort of our standing rule thank you for being here in the sy0 601 security plus study group we have many things happening right now with security plus it's a relatively new certification exam version so there are videos being produced constantly i think last week i produced and put at least 10 videos out over the last month there have been about 50 videos 60 videos that have been added online and there's many many more to come i have a whole chunk i haven't even edited yet and another 50 or so videos that i still still have to shoot so there's plenty more and if you want to see those videos you want to be part of that make sure you visit our youtube channel professormesser.com youtube and you can of course have a look at those there is a weekly pop quiz question for security plus you can find that on my twitter feed at professormesser.com twitter or if you like pretty pictures with your questions you can get it at professormesser.com instagram that would be able to find what you need to find from those links right there so we've got two different certifications that we're dealing with right now well one certification but two different exams so right now you could take one of two different certification exams and earn your security plus you get to choose which one so the first one is the sy0 501 this was an exam that was released on october the 4th of 2017 it will be retired on july 31st so july 31st is you have all of that time now we're sitting here at the end of february you have plenty of time to study and take this exam for most of you i think the average for most folks is about three months you got plenty of time if that's the case to be able to learn everything finish up your studies earn that sort of certification by taking the sy-0501 exam and when you pass that exam even if you take the exam on july 31st and you pass it's still good for three years so the the exam is different than the certification the exam questions go away in july your certification will continue to be valid for three years of course comptia updates their exams usually about every three years so there was an update in november to the sy0 601 exam brand new set of exams brand new set of questions brand new set of exam objectives this was probably if we do the math we'll probably retire somewhere in 2024. i know that's so long away it doesn't really matter but i figured we put it in there anyway so you could see the differences between the two there are significant differences between these two exams these are not the same thing but just a little bit different in the newer version this was not a 20 update to the content this was a significant update to the content only 50 of the information in 501 made it into the 601 half of it's gone and the 601 is 30 bigger so so the amount of new content in the 601 exam is from a content creator's perspective it's massive change it's a massive update so if you are planning to study and pick whichever one you want to do i have no vested interest in either i think the 501 is the better choice for you which is why i have that link there why you shouldn't wait for the sy-0601 at professormesser.link 601 wait i think your better chance for earning your certification is to take the 501 before it retires on july the 31st so that's that's why i have that there it really is your best bet is to take that 501. i realize there are people taking the 601 so and that's fine too we're just starting to see books come out onto the market this was released in november but this is normal when an exam is first released it takes some time for content to get created because it takes time to create content so that's a good example of why that is whether you take the 501 or 601 exam it is exactly the same one exam 90 minutes long a maximum of 90 questions you might get fewer questions than 90 questions there uh the scoring is exactly the same so the scoring scale is between 100 and 900 passing score you get would be a 750. what does that mean well we don't know because comptia doesn't share their scoring system it's not a percentage it's set of points each question's worth a different number so we don't know uh just do the best you can and hope you get a 750. that's my advice to you the exam itself is mostly multiple choice but there are performance-based questions as well i have a performance-based question for you today so that's our that's our overview of the exam we can mull that over as we are going through some of these things today the 501 exam as i mentioned still available out there so of course all of my study materials are there if you're studying for that exam my success bundle is still available so an offline version of all my videos mp3 versions of all of these videos my course notes my practice exams my exam hacks ebook which you can only get with the success bundle it's an ebook i created that talks about the the testing process sort of outside the scope of security plus or network plus or a plus how can you best prepare for the exam that's what the exam hacks ebook is about you get preferred access to this q a so that's another great uh feature of the success bundle there's some more things in there as well you can find out more about the success bundle at professormesser.com 501 sb and as soon as we finish the videos for the 601 we'll have a 601 success bundle as well there are also some free questions on my website that are security plus questions for the 501. you can find those at professormesser.com take 10. there's also questions there for the a plus and network plus that type of thing so uh that's available for you to go through if you're playing take that 501 this study group is available on replay on youtube immediately afterwards so there's a couple minutes after i hit the stop button they process it and then they'll be able to you'll be able to watch it online i also created podcast version of this so if you have a podcast listening program this will download into your listening program automatically as soon as i post it and you can find that at professormesser.compodcast you can also find the rss feeds there or you can just play it from this page so if just want to listen in you can stream it directly from that page and listen to the entire study group i break them up into the actual study group and then the after show depending on what you would like to listen to you've got some choices about a day after this you'll find that there will be time stamps in the youtube video description these timestamps are created by my marketing manager lori who is listening to this replay right now everybody say hi to lori thank you lori for listening in and creating these time stamps it is a gives you a place where you can jump directly to questions directly to answers find exactly the phone call you heard that you were trying to get more information on very useful so this is one where i think can really help you and you can go back years now and see these time stamps and and youtube is even enhancing their player to make these timestamps even better so there's some nice features there on youtube if you're watching the video replay let's go back to look at the question we asked earlier which was which of the following is responsible for enforcing rules during a cyber security exercise is that the white team the purple team the red team or the blue team and if we look at your results 45 percent of you say that's the white team 17 no 31 percent said blue team 17 said purple team 7 said the red team it's like halo we aren't quite sure which color it's supposed to be well if we're dealing with in the enforcement of rules in security you've probably heard about the red team and the blue team before you might have heard of the purple team but the white team is the one that's responsible for enforcing those rules making decisions determining what the results of these things should be they are the referee so to speak they're the manager of the process so if you're in the middle of a formal security exercise these are the folks that will be able to point you in the right direction and say you did the right thing or you didn't do the right thing so that's it's completely up to them they're the boss so the white team is the answer to our question if you answered a 45 percent of you did answer a white team that is the right answer so that also is our rewind question for last month hopefully that's something you can remember that we did last month and if you didn't remember then now you've learned something new that definitely is a 601 question so that might help you as we go through all of these let's do another question but our first new question of the month is not a multiple choice question our first new question of the month is a performance-based question performance-based questions are related to uh anything that is not multiple choice that's how it's really defined anything that's not multiple choice so if there is a fill in the blank question a question where they put you to a command prompt and ask you to perform a function a drag and drop question a matching question a question where you have to put things in a certain order from highest to lowest fastest to slowest you've got some options there so this performance-based question of the month this one for those of you that are listening on the podcast you probably won't be able to do this one audio wise this one involves a picture but this one is one that hopefully you can step through to figure out the details so let's step through our performance-based question of the month the question asks create firewall rules that would allow encrypted web communication between the management server and the web server and explicitly block all traffic between the file server and the database server so this was the question we want to create firewall rules that would allow encrypted web communication between the management server and the web server and explicitly block all traffic between the file server and the database server so you can see on your screen is a network map i should probably get my big head out of the way so you can actually answer this question let's do this see if i can do this properly if i hit the right button there we go so here you go you won't see me on this but at least you can see the picture now this uh question again says i want a firewall rule you can see there's two rules there in the firewall list in the middle that would allow encrypted web communication between management server and web server and explicitly block all traffic between the file server and the database server this is not unlike a question that you might get on the exam where it's sort of a diagram and they're asking questions about what's in the diagram or you have to complete different aspects of the diagram this is one that you should know about and of course if you're getting into i.t security understanding how firewall rules work is an important part of that it certainly helps also if you're looking at the firewall rules sometimes you're presented with a list of firewall rules and it says here's a here's a traffic flow what happens to this traffic flow in these firewall rules so this this can be very very helpful for you to step through this for those of you looking at this picture i'm going to read out the i didn't have enough room to put everything on one screen here so the the question again says create firewall rules that would allow encrypted web communication between the management server and the web server and explicitly block all traffic between the file server and the database server so here you go this is this is what we would do for those in the chat room are compti exams based around cisco devices well i would not say based around no it's not really based around any device the the comptia exams are vendor neutral so you could get questions about cisco or about microsoft or about palo alto networks or about checkpoint or about mcphee or about semantic or about they could be about anything there's no specific manufacturer that comptia would focus on and most of the questions are relatively generic so a question like this applies to any firewall so if you are someone who is working through firewalls can i pop this up there it is so if you're someone who is working with a firewall firewall rules are pretty much the same regardless of what firewall you're on there are some differences with some of the next-gen firewalls because there's additional capabilities in those firewalls but this is not a next-gen question this question is more along the lines of a traditional firewall rule you can think of it that way and having those things there let's see how you did number of viewers submitting your answer very slowly i think we need to step through this one step by step and see if we can decipher what it is we would like out of this question so here we go here's how we would do this so first let's look at the picture that is here uh is my database server part of this it is so you're not going to see me on this i'll keep my head out of the way because the database server is up there at the top where this is so let's step through how do you know if you got it right you're about to find out so here we go here is the answer to the question so create firewall rules that would allow encrypted web communication we'll start with the first one between the management server let me pull up my rules here there's our rule base we have to be able we have a rule number and then i need a source ip a destination ip a tcp or udp protocol with the port and whether we're going to allow or block it so the first one we want to do is this one between the management server and the web server so i've drawn a little arrow on here so our source is the 10.2.1.47 our web server is 10.1.1.2 so this is this is one where uh you would have to go through well i this is one where we can start then with the management server so our source is 10.2.1.47 we'll move it in here our destination should be the web server 10.1.1.2 and what we want to allow is encrypted web communication now i realize in the security plus exam objectives there are no port numbers listed in there they are going to assume that in your world of i.t security that you know what the encrypted web port number happens to be so port numbers are something that you should already have familiar if you're already at this point so we are looking at port 443 so that's one you're just going to have to remember you just have to know this from your a plus studies your network plus studies you probably know it just by using browsers at this point but that is port 443 is what you want to put into that list and we wanted to allow this communication so of course we're going to tell it this position in here to allow this traffic flow now the second part of this question said explicitly block all traffic between the file server and the database server now in a normal firewall in most firewalls and really all firewalls these days if you put nothing else in this rule base it's done you're finished it's going to block everything after this if it's not explicitly listed in the rule base it gets blocked which makes sense from a security perspective doesn't it if you're not telling it to be allowed it should all be blocked but this is as you can see in the question i asked you to explicit block all traffic between the file server and database server i'll explain why we might want to do that in just a moment so our next step is between the file server and the database server there's that we're going the other direction at this point file servers down here at 10.1.1.3 the database server is 10.2.1.20. so we want to make sure that we're able to put that in there it's the same process we'll start with the file server 10.1.1.3 our destination is 10.2.1.20 we'll add it into the mix we want to put the protocol in well in this case we're blocking everything so the protocol is really both really any we call it and then the port number is any it's any any this is the this if you ever talk to a firewall person and you're trying to troubleshoot a problem and they'll even tell you well i said it to any any and then you know okay that means you put everything everything and there's any any and of course in this case it's an explicit block we are telling the firewall absolutely block block block block it's what we want to do so that is that is our two rules we will in rule number one our source ip is 10.2.1.47 destination ip 10.1.1.2 the protocol is tcp port number 443 and we're going to allow that the second is 10.1.1.3 destination ipf 10.2.1.20 and then it's any any block so there's a number of questions that have come up about these firewall rules and really firewalls in general these are firewall questions i think a lot of people are asking about the first is and i mentioned this why are we putting a block in here if by default really every firewall you're going to run into is going to be able to block implicitly there's effectively a block at the bottom you never see that blocks everything that wasn't part of the firewall rules most of the reasons for this and i've customers or people that i've worked with in the past have done many things this way uh maybe uh and this is usually the way an implicit block is rarely if ever logged you just don't log them because it would just be logging everything everything that was blocked it would be logging can you imagine a log full of all of these blocks it would just be massive so most firewalls if it is an implicit block if you don't have a firewall rule it doesn't get logged it's effectively what that means so some people though say especially some very smart security people say yeah but i want to see if anybody ever tries to do this if anybody ever tries to communicate between those two devices i want that in my log that's important to us there may be many reasons why that would be important that's important to us and i want it to be in the log so i'm going to create a firewall rule that explicitly blocks it so that if it is blocked it goes into the log and now later on a month from now a year from now if i need to go back and either prove or disprove there was communication between those two devices it's in my log i can see all of it so that's why we would want to create an explicit block i've had some people i've set up firewalls for said at the bottom of the rule base put source ip any destination ip any protocol any port number any block they wanted to log every single block to their firewall and there may be very good reasons to do that as well this was a federal government facility so they really wanted to see everything that wasn't allowed they wanted logged and they they kept that log it was a massive log so when you do that of course there's a number of things you have to do on the back end to make sure you have enough storage space to make sure your logs are are able to be stored make sure you're you're offloading that to a sim that the sim has enough storage space there's all these things that happen but if you engineer it properly you can absolutely do that makes perfect sense and that's one of the reasons you would make that happen another question in the chat room was why did we only block it in one direction or allow it in one direction that's the beauty of a stateful firewall every firewall you're going to run into is a stateful firewall i realize in the in the exam content that we get an understanding there's a description of stateful versus not stateful and it's important to understand the differences but a stateful firewall will allow traffic going this direction because that was the rule we wanted the rule was that we wanted to allow encrypted web communication between the management server and web server we didn't care about the other direction where it started but when you have this rule set up that would allow it when that first goes out between those two let's bring up our traffic flow for this one there's the traffic flow between the did i want to go the management there it is so between the management server and the web server when the management server sends this traffic to the web server the firewall allows it and then it makes a note saying hey that management server just sent some traffic to the web server let me create an item in my state in the state log in a state entry it's usually in memory but there is a it logs the fact that this management server started a communication with the web server and now that it knows the state of that or that conversation it also recognizes the web server is going to have to respond back to the management server and because there was already an outbound message to that server that was allowed we will also allow the response so that's the beauty of a stateful firewall it remembers the state and we don't have to create a yet another rule that allowed the traffic going the other direction and in fact the state that it allows is just that session it just doesn't allow all traffic from the web server to go back to the management server if we're communicating to that web server over a particular port number it has to send the traffic back over that port number it's only going to allow the traffic back over that port number so that's why we don't have to put multiple rules in our rule base it makes the rule base much simpler to understand it makes the firewall much simpler to use and it makes perfect sense that way because if you're going to communicate to a device and that's allowed wouldn't you want the conversation to come back to you shouldn't that also be allowed in some firewalls you can turn that feature off you can turn off the stateful capability and you would have to put in a rule that allowed the conversation the other direction so that's one where this this becomes pretty important to know the sort of the nuances of working with these firewalls and that's why those two rules are in here and that's why we only needed two rules in this list because of that so hopefully you were able to get those rules there were a few curve balls in here uh the curveballs with the port numbers is important sort of the the broad understanding of the security plus exam is that you already know these port numbers there are literally zero port numbers listed in the exam objectives so you will probably be expected to know what web traffic uses for port numbers um there's probably a couple of others i wouldn't worry too much over that for the exam but it is something that you may run into especially with a performance-based question like this so hopefully you were able to enjoy that performance-based question i know that was a big one we don't usually do performance-based questions and go into this level of detail but hopefully this would be uh a useful way to do this the the block that we have for the chat room people say why didn't we drop the packets well in this firewall block is effectively the same thing as a drop it drops it on the floor block and drop are effectively the same thing different firewalls use a different nomenclature depending on what they like to use the firewall i used to use had allow and block so that's what i use in here you may find one that says drop in fact if you're using linux some of the linux firewalls use the drop term to drop the packets on the floor same thing same process the the packets don't go through that's the important part of that you know they're not physically dropped right hopefully you did pretty well with this and if you didn't now you know a little bit more about how firewalls work and how these firewall rules work and that can certainly be something you need to do who sweeps them up you do because you're the one with the i.t security professional certification so they're going to give you a broom and you're the one who's gonna have to sweep up all of those packets all over the floor absolutely let's see uh let's now move on we're gonna go past performance-based questions and by the way performance-based questions i do a new performance-based question every month i kind of recycle the topics every year but i do change the content of the questions so you can go back over the last 12 months to every single security plus study group and you will see a performance-based question there and sometimes i mix them up do some new ones so you never know what you're going to find there but that is our performance based question for february thanks for playing along with that let's do another question now we're back to multiple choice like the most of your exam is going to be this multiple choice question asks which of the following would be the best way to provide connectivity to vpcs would that be a transit gateway a containerization manager function as a service or rapid elasticity which of the following would be the best way to provide connectivity to vpcs would that be a transit gateway a containerization manager would it be function as a service or would it be rapid elasticity if you think you know the answer go to professormesser.com qa please no answers in the chat room please uh please block in your answer professormesser.comqa how many performance-based questions will there be on the exam usually a handful so this is one of those cases where uh this is uh usually you can think about five sometimes there's more sometimes there's fewer but that's about right on the exam so that's a good thing to at least know about and this is as many people are wondering uh these questions seem to be very focused on the 601 exam yes you have reached the sy-0601 study group so all of these questions will be based on the 601 exam uh and and this is one of those times where you do have to if you don't know what a what the topic of the question is then it becomes very difficult to answer the question so maybe random question we just guess what that's going to be for those of you looking for 501 specific questions i have three and a half years of 501 videos you can go back and watch that are all 501 questions they're all on my website under the sy-0501 study group so you can go back and look at all of those but we're now on to the newer exam i know i tell you it's sort of a mixed message i tell you you should be taking the 501 exam and then i give you a 601 study group but we have to start the new study groups at some point and some of this will overlap by the way as i mentioned 50 of the 501 exam does show up in the 601 exam so this is one where we do have to kind of mix them up a little bit let's see how you did with this one the question asked which of the following would be the best way to provide connectivity to vpcs so this is one where knowing these these new topics is going to be pretty important as you step through this this is definitely a 601 question this is not a 501 question so this is specific that the terms that we have in here are 601 type questions let me see if i can make this a little bit better on the screen so we can all see it uh so the question asks which of the following would be the best way to provide connectivity to vpcs would that be a transit gateway would it be containerization manager would it be function as a service or would it be rapid elasticity so let's have a look at what the what you believe the answer to be the results are we're a little torn but 41 we go not a majority but a plurality of you have said transit gateway 33 percent of you a third of you say containerization manager which sounds great 15 percent say function as a service and 11 say rapid elasticity so as many people are are realizing they have stumbled into the sy-0601 study group this is a 601 specific question this is not a question you will find on your 501 but this does help you if you're somebody who's working through those 601 questions and of course if you're studying for 501 you of course learn something along the way vpc stands for virtual private cloud vpc this is a cloud there's a lot more cloud on the 601 than there was in the 501 for better or for worse there is of course a huge emphasis in cloud technology and as a i.t security professional you're going to need to play along in that game as well probably much much more than you have in the past if you're pulling together a grouping of resources these virtual resources in the cloud you need to put them somewhere and the the where where we put them is the virtual private cloud this is uh a challenge though is that you're probably especially you folks that are managing cloud-based services are going to find that in many environments you have more than one vpc you probably have multiple vpcs many different groups many different application instances maybe you're separating them out by project you can create and build out vpcs in different companies you may be having you may be managing clouds some clouds in the microsoft cloud in the rackspace cloud and in the amazon cloud all the same time so that's a good example of of having to do all of that the problem is how do you connect into any of this it's on the cloud i need some way to securely connect myself and my customers to these vpcs and i need some way to manage the communications process well what you need is a transit gateway you need that's what that's the term that we use there i have a an idea right here in the middle is that transit gateway that once you arrive into the cloud how do you then get to the vpcs and it's through that transit gateway the way that we would normally do this is at the customer side at your site wherever people are connecting they're usually connecting into the transit gateway using a vpn that's a common way to do it if this is a public cloud it's very different you don't need the vpn but then again these wouldn't be private clouds either but this is one where the clouds are private you can't get to these clouds from the outside there's no access to these clouds from the internet so you have to perhaps use an ipsec tunnel from a router that's at your site or you connect via a ipsec or vpn based client on your computer that connects into the transit gateway and once you're connecting the transit gateway you can gain access to all of those vpcs which very often are on different ip subnets for your networking folks becomes useful to have that there so this is the pretty much the normal architecture there are nuances associated with that but this is the architecture that you will find if you are building out some private clouds at a third-party cloud provider and getting that connectivity the transit gateway is one of those terms you need to know and that was the correct answer in this case the 42 percent of you that answered transit gateway got that one absolutely right 32 percent of you said a containerization manager that containerization manager is a real thing especially if you're doing container based application instances that's another set of topics on the 601 exam that you won't find on the 501 but the containerization manager is one that allows you to manage the process of building and tearing down those containers for your application instances that doesn't really help you with connectivity to vpcs however we have 15 of you function as a service yet another cloud type technology that you need to be familiar with on the 601 exam function as a service is a way to manage access and usability of these application instances in this case 15 percent of you chose that but not the correct answer function as a service doesn't have anything to do with vpcs um or at least not the management and connectivity of the vpcs and lastly eleven percent rapid elasticity which describes the ability to increase or decrease resources behind the scenes very cloud based topic uh very useful for scalability but really doesn't help you with actual connectivity to a virtual private cloud so that is the idea behind these is that and as you can see here a lot of cloud technologies and application technologies on the 601 exam in this case we were looking for transit gateway and if you answered a 42 percent of you got that one absolutely right well done this is uh hopefully one you'll be able to be a little more familiar with as we go through these questions i have another 601 question for those of you in the chat room who've now figured out you're on the 601 study group i have another 601 question that will confound you this the 601 question asks which of the following would be the best way to monitor a cloud-based microservice architecture whatever that is would it be an ips would it be snmp traps would it be ipsec or would it be api inspection which of the following would be the best way to monitor a cloud-based microservice architecture is it ips snmp traps ipsec or api inspection do you think you know the answer lock in your answer professormesser.com q a qa i would not say that the 601 questions are more difficult than the 501 questions but the topics are certainly broader as i mentioned the exam is 30 larger this is one of the reasons the exam is 30 larger uh because of this uh so there's a huge number of topics you have to know for the 601 exam and as i said earlier in the pre-show i don't think the difficulty level of the 601 is more difficult but because you have to know so much more it's a harder exam to study for you have to know more so it's harder i guess that makes sense doesn't it 30 harder than the 501. we'll talk about specifics around how many objectives that is in the after show if you'd like to it's it's in my video as well where i break down exactly how many objectives and what the differences are between all of those i'll be glad to go through that in the after show if you stick around just remind me in the chat room as we're doing that hey weren't you going to talk about objectives in the 601 maybe i'll remember we'll find out this is a good one because it talks about one of those new topics on the 601 exam which is microservice architectures let's see how you did which of the following would be the best way to monitor a cloud-based microservice architecture uh would it be an ips an snmp trap ipsec or api inspection 49 of you 50 now say api inspection will say that's a majority 26 said i'll use snmp traps thank you very much 13 said an ips and 11 said ipsec that's what you would use microservice architectures it's the new thing it's the latest stuff it's the way that application developers are creating these apps you know we used to create apps where you would sit down you would write a million lines of code and you would compile all that code together and you've got an application and if you ever need to change anything with that application you have to go back into that million lines of code you have to change the thing you were going to change maybe it was a misspelling you have to compile the entire thing again and then you have to publish it as one big application well we've realized there's some much better ways to do this what if you could break the application up into little pieces so that there was an inventory piece there's a login piece there's a report writing piece there's all these little pieces in the middle of the app and we could do that we call these microservices so that you could have a part of the application running and if you need to change or update part of the app you can update that micro service without changing any other services associated with that application it sort of makes perfect sense doesn't it well now with cloud-based technologies you're really able to do this so there might be a single database or multiple databases that are used by these microservices but how do you get a client screen that's really one screen to somehow talk to the right microservice you need something in the middle and that something in the middle is an application programming interface gateway and api gateway is the best way to do this it is one that really allows you to manage the communication between the clients and the microservice and ultimately the data for those of us that are dealing with security protection of the data is so incredibly important so having that gateway there not only gives us the ability to forward information to the correct microservice now we can start putting some security policies on this api gateway maybe we're only going to let certain people from certain areas of the world access certain microservices maybe we want to see if anybody's trying to do some fuzzing and we're noticing a lot of weird requests coming in to these micro services we can block it at the api gateway so nothing that is unusual makes it past our gateway it is the sort of the the security middleman as well as the application enablement piece of this and of course since we're at the gateway we can monitor it how many people are making queries what do those queries look like do we see multiple queries from multiple people do we see a large number of queries from one person so we can start narrowing down where some specif the suspicious activity might be this is a very useful way to manage applications the useful way to create applications and manage them and secure them so that's the api inspection and the api integration so if you answered api inspection that was the right answer 53 of you chose api inspection 25 at snmp traps and that is certainly a way to manage devices traditionally that's how we've done it with snmp traps but this question asked about the best way to monitor cloud-based microservice architectures and although snmp could be used here because those databases the microservices themselves might have the ability to send snmp information but we were really looking for the best option for cloud-based micro services and in this case api inspections just a better answer 13 of you said an ips intrusion prevention system ips is not really it's sort of like that old school looking for a signature coming through and if the signature matches we know it's a known vulnerability but we just talked about somebody fuzzing the api gateway that's not going to match any of our our signatures in our ips so probably not the best choice for a cloud-based microservice architecture an ipsec is an encryption tunnel usually in an encrypted tunnel most commonly an encrypted tunnel uh doesn't have anything to do with monitoring any type of architecture much base much less a cloud-based microservice architecture so not the best choice they are either the best choice was the 153 percent of you chose which was api inspection if you're watching this video for continuing education unit credit and if you have no idea what i'm talking about then this doesn't apply to you but if you are watching this for api or api credit maybe you are watching it for api credit you're watching it for ceu credit you can of course uh follow these instructions to receive an email from me that has that certification in it uh what you want to do is go to the top or the bottom of the professor messer website click the contact us link and in that form put your name your email address uh put in the subject line this is the february 2021 security plus study group and in the body of the message put the super secret code word of the month api inspection that is our super secret code word of the month api inspection then of course if you want to put anything else in that message as well you're more than welcome to i read through every single one of them they all come to me and i process them manually so it takes me about a week to get them to you and although i'm not able to reply back to every single one of these i absolutely read through every single one that you send me so that's another thing that you can do and then about a week i'll send you back an email that is digitally signed which says you must have watched this here is your one credit hour of a ceu that is in the webinar category so it's very specific i'll come to you does that so that's your process hopefully that i i look forward to your letters your cards and letters for this let's do another one in our list uh is this question here's a question that would apply for all of you studying for the 501 i've got a question for you that applies the 501 as well how about that here's a question that asks which of the following would be the best method of sending data to a specific port number on a remote device would that be trace route netcat dig or route which of the following would be the best method of sending data to a specific port number on a remote device would that be traceroute netcat dig or route oh it feels so good to have a question that applies back to the old exam doesn't it well if you know the answer you can answer it right here at professormesser.com qa that's the way you would do it and this is one where no questions in the chat room no hints in the chat room and in fact this question is written as people are mentioning in the chat room but wait i would use a different way than you've put into this question and in fact i probably would too but that wasn't the question comptia does this all the time they might take the question that or the answer that you is most common or the one that you would think is most common and they don't put it there and the reason they don't is because they want you of course to be able to answer based on which of the following perhaps the one that me i would use perhaps the one that you would use not available on the system maybe it's not even installed maybe the system's not connected to the internet you can't simply install things you can't do an apt-get you can't yum things on this machine you can't set up things wheeling nearly on this machine you have to use what's in front of you it's a closed system and the thing that you would use is not available the only choices you have are trace route net cat dig and route and i got to tell you that's pretty real world that's i have been in a lot of environments where people are doing a lot of things and uh this is one of course where you really should um as you go through this you really should be familiar with all of these different options and of course they are part of the exam objectives so you absolutely need to know that too whenever you're working through it see if you happen to know this one this is this is a very common thing i've been in client environments where sorry that's not available on this machine you have to just use what's available to you can't install a program nope we're clock we're locked down you can't do that without going through the change control committee that's that's a normal that's normal world so see if you can break through all of those options go to professormesser.com qa lock in your option there as well so hopefully you're familiar with these things all four of these by the way are both in the 501 exam objectives and the 601 exam objectives so you need to know all of the things that are listed as possible answers and trust me it's just a subset in fact they went a little crazy on the 601. you think the 501 had a lot of things of the command line a lot of utilities to know oh wait till you get to the 601. oh it's it is it's nothing the 501 is easy compared to what you're going to need to know on the 601. they went crazy with stuff it's just delightful it's amazing the stuff they put onto that one but i got it to be fair everything they put in the 601 all good stuff it's all accurate it's good things to know it's just a lot it's just uh just me there how many ceus are required to maintain your assert is it 50 and i think you only get 10 uh webinar category ceus something like that i think that's that's the right number the right answer is out on the comptia website obviously they list everything there let's uh see how you did the question again which of the following would be the best method of sending data to a specific port number on a remote device would that be trace route netcat dig or route and we have 51 percent of us that say it's net cat we have 12 percent that say it's trace route we have 24 said route and 13 said dig i did that the wrong order but you get the idea 24 said route uh it's almost a quarter and then sort of a two white tie for third there between traceroute and dig well in this case the 50 of us that said net cat is probably where we would kind of focus our efforts indeed netcat is a great way to do this this is how you would read or write information to the network you can open a port send some data receive some data you're sort of kind of got a lot of flexibility with how you're sending information over the network and netcat gives you the ability to listen on a port number to transfer data to scan ports to send information across the network to another port very very flexible to have this here uh do you want to create a backdoor in a system netcat will do that for you can pop open and create an open port and then send data into it very useful to have that um and it's uh some options there if you're running windows for example you may not have a net cap but there may be an ncat or something else you can run there are versions of this available in many different operating systems with different capabilities microsoft windows is a does not allow you to do certain things with port numbers and available sockets but you can do this on mac os and linux for example much easier so it just depends what you want to do for those but netcat is the right answer that's the one you want to focus on in fact 51 percent of you say b net cat that was the right answer 24 of you said route uh route is a great way to see what routes a particular device is going to use or to even add or remove routes from a routing table but it doesn't really help you send information to a specific port number on a remote device one thing that would qualify as trace route you know traceroute can use certain protocols that are specific to a tcp udp and certain port numbers i know traceroute commonly uses icmps you don't commonly think of it as a port number sort of device but the the message that is sent out via trace route which we are changing the time to live on can be anything it can be any port number it can be any protocol what we're really looking to see is the icmp message that is being sent back if at all possible but that is not a great way of sending data to a specific port number on a remote device from all the options that are here that is that is really not even close to being the best one in this list so this is one of those and very common to see that multiple answers could technically be correct except for that term best and that's where we really have to know how this would work and then lastly dig dig is a nice utility that allows you to query name servers it's not used at all for sending data to a specific port number on a remote device the only one that makes any sense here the best sense is netcat 51 very useful utility very flexible utility if you've never used it before that could be something you may want to have a look at it could be really useful well as you've already seen on the 601 exam it's a big exam there's a bunch of new topics to give you an idea how big it is i created course notes for this for all 176 videos that will eventually be posted but the course notes are done already i write my entire course first i create the course notes first and then i start shooting the videos so there's things in here that you haven't even seen yet and yet you could get the course notes and you'd be able to see what's coming in those videos right now this set of notes how many how many pages let me lift my glasses up so i can actually read 120 pages probably have it on the screen right i was correct i have verified that is 120 pages that's big it got really large because it is big but it's also available in digital form that's the physical form that i have here uh in the course notes and it covers everything from the exam so if somebody like you wanted to kind of not have to read or watch through all these videos and have to take your own notes can you imagine going through 176 videos and writing down notes for all 176 videos why would you do that why'd i throw this on the floor you should do it you should just grab the course notes it's all in here all of in fact i have it why am i showing you on this little box on the screen i have it on my screen so that you can see it here they are the course notes it's big so all of the diagrams all of the text all of the details from my course they're in here so everything is in the course notes this is a great way to summarize everything and i think it's a great summary you can take along with you it's a pdf file you can put in all your mobile devices you can put it on your computer at home if you want a printed version you can purchase the printed version and if you purchase the printed version i send you the this uh the digital version for free so as soon as you buy the printed version you can get that digital version downloaded immediately you can find all this on my website professormaster.com for 601 course notes and a great way to support the site too for those of you that are wanting to support the site that's i think i want you to get something in return you'll notice i don't really take donations or have not traditionally taken donations i prefer you getting something for your money and i think this is a great trade it's a great way to to summarize this information you need for your exam so it might help you out too let's shift gears back to a 601 question since we're talking about it the 601 sorry 501 people but this 601 question asks which security framework is mandatory for u.s federal agencies and includes a six-step process now if you are someone who is that you're working through the details of this exam uh and you've never seen this before in the 601 then you're just going to take a guess at this one i guess the options are a nist rmf an ssae sock 2 type 1 and 2 a csa ccm or a cis csc all four of those things that sound like i just made them up are real things thank you federal federal agencies for your abbreviations so this is this is one of those questions where this could really be this could be difficult if you've never stepped into these before which security framework is mandatory for us federal agencies and includes a six-step process is it a nist rmf is it the ssae soc2 type one and two is it csa ccm or is it ciscsc nope didn't make them up they're real those are real things real stuff you and you need to know them even better you have to be able to recognize these for your exam this is um so you've i've been i've been a little bit you notice i've been a little bit uh um very very specific about some of the things you'll see on this exam uh this is one of those things though that i have no idea why you would need to know this for security plus probably a later exam maybe the cisa maybe but who knows this is this is one of those questions where if you if you're in the federal government you probably know this one cold because you have to work with it all the time if you're not in the federal government this is just a bunch of letters thrown together and in fact it doesn't even concern you for the most part the problem though if if you start saying that about some of these topics on the exam these actually good thing to know the things that these acronyms dealing with these security frameworks are actually valuable security frameworks so beyond the scope of wow this is a lot of stuff and a lot of acronyms and is it incredibly necessary or does it apply security plus in the very broad i.t security sense these are good things to know about so i think that's the approach they really took with security plus to to to their detriment maybe we'll see they made it big made it large well thank you watch for telling me that something is going on in my life uh let's see how you did with this one oh i can't wait to see let's go through this one which let's get let's get finished with this one shall we which security framework is mandatory for us federal agencies and includes a six-step process 53 percent of you said it's the nist rmf 15 no 19 percent say it's the cisc 15 said the ssae sock 2 type 1 and 2 and 13 said the csa ccm all real frameworks all listed in the security plus exam objectives 53 said nist rmf for those of us that are not in federal agencies we're going with that we're going to trust our federal agency friends who are on the call who are watching this and yes we found out that this is the nist the national institute of standards technology risk management framework the rmf and it is indeed mandatory for us federal agencies in their six-step process for this framework you have to categorize the environment select the controls implement the controls assess if the controls are working authorize to the make a decision to authorize the systems and then lastly monitor them for ongoing compliance that is the framework that every federal agency in the united states has to follow it's pretty like i said it's a that is a valid framework it is extensive it is well written i've read through all of these frameworks so you don't have to uh or maybe you do have to but it is a a fine way to uh to set up a structured format for all of your security requirements in the organization so another one of those examples of of things you need to know for the exam i realize we're at the top of the hour but i want to get one more question in because that performance-based question took a lot of time and for those of you who are here for 501 questions let's end on a question that applies to both exams both the 501 and the 601 shall we here is the question and it asks which of these threat actors would be motivated by social change and would likely have limited funding options would that be a nation state a shadow i.t a competitor or a hacktivist which of these threat actors would be motivated by social change and would mo and would likely have limited funding options is that a nation state a shadow i.t a competitor or a hacktivist i'm saying for those of you on the podcast hacktivist with a h at the beginning a hacktivist for this if you think you know the answer go to professormester.comqa and lock in your answer have you fill those in for what we're doing here should be something we break down oh is there another one there oh yes there is e is organized crime thank you i did one with five answers i usually do the five answers and for some reason i didn't on the others but now i do so i did all of this so we have nation state shadow i.t competitor hacktivist and organized crime for these being able to make that happen let's see if you happen to know the answers and breaking these down i almost missed the most important one on the list is answer e you have to have all five of them have a good set of questions good set of answers on your exam you may get some questions that have five answers on them most of the answers are probably going to be four but uh that works whenever you start working through these so we'll have to work through some of these answers too see if you figure out what these happen to be now for those of you that are new to this exam that you've never sort of worked through these before um these some of these questions may be very familiar to you but if you've never worked with comptia you may also find that some of this is something you've never seen before so that's uh an example of what you would run into which of these threat actors would be motivated by social change and would likely have limited options let's see how we did with this one between nation state shadow i.t competitor hacktivist and organized crime we have 89 percent of you that say it's the hacktivist in us that is trying to create that social change i think of all of the uh the threat actors in this list that's probably the the process of elimination kind of ends on that one almost every time to have that there it's a hacker who has an idea really what they want to do they have they have goals they have objectives they have things they're going to take over the world with their social change their political agenda their their need to do something that they feel very strongly about and they are going to sometimes work with an external organization to make that happen this is this is in some cases some smart folks who really know what they're doing and have a lot of tools available what they usually don't have though is a lot of money especially relative to the other threat actors that were in that list is you need some money to be able you know to eat and stuff this is the most important part of this and a hacktivist does not always have that flexibility that luxury if you will uh but if you look at these others you can kind of break these two things down a nation state has tons of money that's not their issue shadow i.t most of the reasons they are a shadow i.t is that they have money so they were able to buy their own equipment and go around the i.t department that's not the issue a competitor very often has plenty of money in organized crime that's nothing but money that's why they exist so if you just looked at the money side of this you would be able to get rid of all the others and hacktivist would be the right answer on this case as well that's one of those situations where you can almost take portions of the question that's being asked and break it down from there and maybe that can help you some of the things you're doing let's uh well this is one by the way these questions for those of you that have not looked at the sy00601 exam objectives make sure you do that if nothing else you've learned today that more than half of the exam is brand new that's so many new topics on this exam so make sure you get the exam objectives they are free they are available on the comptia website i have a link to those exam objectives on my site if you go to professormesser.com objectives or you can of course go to professor go to the google machine type in comptia exam objectives that'll get you there as well either one of those works and it's incredibly important there's tons of great information in those exam objectives they should be the first thing you use in your studies they should be the last thing you reference before going into the exam they will tell you if you have memorized everything you need to memorize and there's a lot to memorize more important than ever we do one of these study groups every month we've come to the end of the study groups for february but next next week we start up again on the second and the fourth we have some a plus study groups our next network plus study group is on the 25th of march our next security plus study group way down here on the 30th gotta wait that long for another security plus study group i know my my world is weird right now i got a lot of stuff going on so that's one of those situations where you've you maybe you'll you'll be able to join us on the 30th and of course i'm always around online you can always send me a message on my website on twitter facebook on linkedin whatever it happens to be but these dates also can change so this is one of those where always keep checking back uh you will see that i keep my calendar online always updated uh that that link is professormesser.com calendar to get you there so make sure you're always checking back on when that happens to be for those of you taking the 501 exam haven't forgotten about you i also of course notes for the 501 exam so make sure you have a look on my website the 501 course notes plenty to see there the 501 exam you actually have some advantages because i have my practice exams available for the 501 so this is a there's a big books like 300 pages of questions and answers so be sure to check the q a on my website plenty there and how we work through it that's uh that's all on the website find it at professormesser.com we've gone through an hour of q a can you believe it stick around for the after show though because you can ask me questions now about q a uh in the after show i'll open up phone lines you can put questions into the chat room uh i'm far from from leaving we're not done yet but of course i still have those weekly questions available on twitter and instagram you can find it at professormesser.com twitter professormesser.com instagram of course you've got all of these new videos coming out for the 601 if you would like to be informed the second i put it online then you should subscribe to my youtube channel professormesser.com youtube hit the bell smash the button as the kids say to be able to know when those are released and don't forget about security plus course notes and the exams for the 501 and 601 there's links on the website at professormesser.com stick around for the after show thank you for joining us for this first study group uh the first hour of this study group we've got more to come and we'll see you on the other side see you next time on the sy0 601 security plus study group alright here we go on the other side let's get some things up and running see there's a lot there's a lot of new stuff on the 601. some of it a little bit crazy but i can i can talk a little smack about the 601 you won't hear a lot of other people doing that uh i like i can i i say when things are good and i say when things are bad i like to to give you a good balance between those two things uh but i am not a comptia partner so i can criticize without concern and i'll tell you that if you're planning to take the 501 or 601 i would take the 501 right now so much easier to have that happen if you'll bear with me a moment i'll get the phone lines up and running and uh we'll be able to get there um for this uh if you are ever in this situation um if you hold on just a moment i will get my skype up and running here we go there's nobody here doing this for me so i have to call into my own phone lines and then i'll give you information on how you can do the same thing uh i'll type in my secret code into this thing here and the nice lady says six digit pin all right i'll put in my six digit pin and the nice lady says welcome professor messer thanks nice lady well that means that you can join us as well it's a toll-free number in the continental united states you can join us at 855-785-7545 that's 855-785-rj45 you can also call anywhere in the world in skype uh skype allows you to call toll-free numbers without any skype in it so it's free if you do that you put a plus one at the beginning that's country code for us plus one eight five five seven eight five seven five four five gets you to exactly the same place for those as well so this is one where uh for those of you asking the sy-0501 expires on july the 31st all the way through the end of july so if you are planning to take the 501 exam you should do the math if you're someone who can take an exam in three to four months and you're through it and finished then stick with a 501 if you are someone like me that takes six months to get through an exam you may have to make a tough decision about taking the 501 or the 601 so that's the situation you'll find yourself in um in in that particular case when does network plus retire uh well if network plus is due to the new ones due to be released in september so probably march of 2022 so this time next year uh is probably about right for network plus we'll see we don't know for sure but i think that's a pretty good estimate of when that might be for those of you that are working on your network plus exam i mentioned in the show and earlier in the main part of the show that i would talk to you about the different uh objectives and what's expected on the 501 501 versus the 601 so i have a list of all of the objectives on the 601 and i've counted through all of them so let me give you the stats for those of you wondering so on the 501 exam if you were to go into the exam objectives and you were to count all of the individual objectives which is what i do because i'm creating video content for each one of those there were 700 objectives which is a pretty good number that's a big that's a little bigger than network plus it's not as big as a the 2a plus is combined but that's that's a big exam 501 is a big exam no question and the topics on the 501 exam are very detailed in some cases so 778 on the 601 exam that number goes to 1038 objectives it is big set of objectives so that one's pretty large that's an increase of 33.42 yeah i did it to two decimal places 33.42 percent so 33 percent larger the third larger it's a big exam uh 778 was a big exam this is a really big exam 1038. of the objectives there are 529 of those are brand new objectives that were not found in the 501 so 50 50.96 of the exam brand new topics 50.96 so when i tell people don't go take the 601 exam go take the 501 exam you're going to be much better off it's going to be a much easier experience for you there's much more content available to study from and at the end of it's exactly the same cert that's what i mean when i say that like those are big numbers that's a lot that you were going to have to remember yeah where where will this end you know you keep going with this the next one's going to have a lot more so uh also in the chat room when will the practice exams for the 601 be available as soon as i finish the videos i'll be writing practice exams for that and updating that as well do i think the content is better in the 601 no it's different it's not much better if anything it's becoming so broad that it doesn't apply to anybody's job anymore that's kind of what it is if you're in it doing security your pro your role is going to be focused on a number of different things but there's no way your role could be focused on anything this broad so they're sort of creating a certification that would apply to everybody uh but the problem is that it applies to nobody it just applies to every possible snare it's a blanket that will cover everything um but it's all good contents that's the trade-off i have is that it doesn't apply to anything you'll be you know to one particular person it's so broad um but all the content in there really is good content so that's that's the the issue with this it's it's more than a mile wide it's 10 miles wide now and an inch deep uh that's that's the difference uh the challenge challenge with that anyway let's um are there any other names updated on the 501 and 601. yeah they updated like 10 different topics nothing too crazy you know the the they did change the only thing that's probably outside the scope of crazy is um the the the man trap there's no man trap anymore we got rid of man trap they don't exist anymore it's an access controlled vestibule that was the only weird one i think everything else pretty much but actually describes it better access control vestibule actually describes what it is now so if anything we've kind of got rid of the dumb names and kind of put names in there that makes sense for this um so i guess that works for me too let's go to the phone lines we'll go to 954 here in florida uh hi caller which name are you calling from how you doing professor messa this is kevin from pembroke pines hey kevin from pines boulevard from silver lakes from down there in miramar how are you sir i'm doing fine thank god i took the the 501 said the 601 thank god because i was lost i was with the questions you just asked right now like these news acronyms and nomenclature i was real lost and i'm like i even bought the 601 uh um study guide just in case you know any uh question i just took the 501 on february 2nd and i passed it and then god took that i was i was thinking i should i take the 601 i was like nah i heard what you said about it is such a leap from the bible when i'm like nah i shouldn't really do that because wow did you you you caught me off guard this session i mean i was really caught off guard it it did this i'm like man i'm glad i will fail this well you know we say this and i i think a lot of this of course is that it's new content and it's sort of new to all of us and we're all sort of learning it for the first time we're all sort of seeing it for the first time i wonder like a year from now we'll be like oh yeah you know i already i know that i've already heard that before it's probably going to be commonplace the i think it's more of the the change is the thing that may even be more dramatic rather than the content we have to learn but but you're not wrong it's so much more content i'm glad you were able to get through it as well yeah and matter of fact we put our psa to anyone out there i took it online and if anybody decided to take that test online if you take it make sure you're using um a residential um account not a business account because i i i'm comcast business and i was taken in online and even i disabled the firewall the test wouldn't go through and i had it on the proctor yeah i disabled the firewall all together and still wouldn't go through and basically i had to retake the test like on two times and the problem they didn't really know they was doing and stuff like that and i had to go to back and forth between pearson and comptia and get it you know um get a new voucher and everything so i just went into the uh um inside my house and which are residential uh internet and i was able to get through okay this is one of those challenges whenever you're doing anything from home on the internet especially this one because they lock down so much of your computer and they can only communicate a certain way and it has to have all of these ports available and open and if you are doing any type of firewalling they have a whole document that describes how you should set this up i i think you may be better off just getting a wide open connection and not having to worry about any of that yeah because like like right now in this room right this damn right now it was the only one with a business account there was the only one that was very secluded that that you know he's known because you know they don't want nobody inside a room they want everything to be succeeded isolated it was the only room so i had to clean out the other room just for that just for this test like it's just like as a wi-fi i mean you have a residential internet so that that was definitely a long process for like two weeks but but it was it's still worth god still i passed the exam and congratulations the other thing too is that when i took the exam it was a lot of on pbq's a lot of performance-based questions i was a bit shocked on that a lot of people are finding it a lot more of them they it's it's something they're putting a little i think they're trying to put a little more emphasis on those to see how people would react yeah i was a little bit shocked about that like like you know about man that's what i mean i remember i took the network plus and the a plus it'll be a couple of pbq's and then they'll go to all the multiple choice but this it was like a lot of pbq's and i was like man that kind of throwed me off but that guy still passed it but you know whatever so you know and once again i bought your your material your study guide and you definitely you're into the i.t industry and you really helped me out with it if theirs i'm glad glad that worked out for you i'm glad you got your certification in i know we're sort of in this transition period probably by the time we get to july we're all going to be much more comfortable with all of this okay so thank you for your time mr uh professor appreciate the call kevin best of luck all right i used to live in pembroke pines among other places in south florida so it's nice to hear from the folks down in my former neck of the woods let's go back to the phone calls to the 443 area code hello caller what's your name are you calling from hi good afternoon professor messer i'm david i'm calling from baltimore hey david um first of all i just i just want to thank you for your materials uh i i use the i i mean i particularly like your tests because it's not just that you um have the tests but you have the answers and the wrong answers and i find that to be a tremendous way to reinforce everything i learned or possibly even to learn it for the first time but i i found it a tremendous learning tool and i did miss it for network plus but i did pass network plus even without it um and now i'm hopefully going to take security plus next week um my question is this uh i was in it or computer tech whatever you want to call it for 28 years uh mostly a programmer i i took a professional detour for seven years and um then due to covet i lost my job and i found out that my state was sponsoring uh a cyber security program so i've been taking these courses right and taking the tests and now i'm at security plus so my question is this how can i best uh present myself now that i'm re-entering uh the tech field um i did you know i was mostly a programmer back in my previous it career but i did do uh desktop support i i i supported a number of researchers uh assembling their pcs believe it or not uh maintaining them and you know i did about three years of that that's like the only support i really have i mean the main main support role i had in those years but how do i present myself i mean i i've listened to other after shows and you say that help desk is the way to break in how do i present myself it's certainly one of the most common ways to break in but one of the one of the advantages you have which other people don't have necessarily going into this is that you have some practical industry experience and the things that you did although you're sort of uh you're sort of waving it off like well i did some of this stuff and worked yes you did actually you worked with this hardware you set it up you got it running you worked with operating systems you understand the way these applications work and you did it and people paid you to do it so you have professional experience working with these computing systems and doing things especially in the it world that were not specific to programming they were a little bit outside the scope of application development so that is you should emphasize these things you should say you have a practical experience that you understand the challenges that you've had to work through problems that occur when you put these things together that you've had to maintain these systems that you've had to remove the malware or whatever the things were that you did are very good things to put on a resume and to talk to people about that you have some practical experience doing so that when they hire you you can hit the ground running you're not going to need a lot of training on the specifics because they're things that you're already familiar with the other piece you may want to consider doing since you're sort of since you're boomerang the boomerang back into all of this uh is that it would be nice if you had some recent activity with some of these things and if you set up a lab at home or you set up the way that things are going to in my video how to get a job in it with no experience i talk about doing some of this you've set up a firewall and an ips at home or you've set up um active directory on a windows server 20 whatever you'd like to choose 2016 is a good one to use so you've got some choices of how you can set up at home so that when you go into an interview you can tell people not only did i used to do this in the past but i've got a lab running at home with active directory it's got its own dns it's one i've connected all my systems in my house to we do some i've got some vms running uh i manage those vms with uh with group policy here are some things that i've modified on some of them so you can tell stories about how you're interacting with what undoubtedly is the largest type of infrastructure you're going to find in most organizations which is microsoft active directory so there's your good one-two punch especially if you're trying to get back into this field or into it in general is you're ready for the help desk or maybe even desktop support maybe you can skip the help desk from your prior experience and go straight to desktop support and you've got some knowledge with active directory that you maybe weren't paid for back in the day but you've done enough in your local lab that you can talk the active directory story to people and you tell people about all the problems you had installing it how you finally got it running how you've now got machines connected to it and here you set up some group policy to lock a machine down or to change the passwords or to push out a certificate or whatever it happens to be there's so many things you can do with active directory the only other thing that i might recommend for you and i don't often recommend this but since you have the background in this is maybe become more familiar with powershell especially in the microsoft environments and python these are probably not the things employers are looking for out of the gate and if you're going into an interview for the help desk you may not specifically mention those skills but if it's a job posting that you're going after that's more desktop support or server support having the knowledge of powershell and python and or either one of those depending on the environment and depending on the employer would really be helpful as a skill set you're bringing to the table and since you already have some of the background on the development side that may just be something that's so natural for your your knowledge base that you can leverage that if you walk into an interview with someone else okay thank you very much could i ask you one last question yeah um okay um you know as i pointed out i was in it for a long time and how do i work the age angle uh the best way to work around ageism and ageism for for you young kids that don't have to worry about ageism uh is is a bit of a problem not just in i.t but sort of in any industry at all is uh is companies may not necessarily realize that they aren't hiring the old folks they aren't hiring the over 40 crowd there is something in it called the gray hair principle or or no hair principle in my case where people who've been around a while actually have some skills they've seen some stuff and can help the process along and the problem if you're you're bouncing between industry and you used to you know be at a higher level in one industry and now you're getting into it you're kind of starting at the bottom and working your way up again and the age differences may be relatively dramatic um there are a couple of ways to approach this one is is go to work for somewhere that has a much broader or or liberal hiring perspective on age like a state or federal government agency they tend to be less interested in how old you are and what your specifics are of your uh your your where you come from and where what you're like and they just want somebody who knows how to do the job when you get into more private companies though and this of course is not not the same across all private companies but this is sort of my perspective of what i've seen you may need some additional leverage and in that case knowing people is your leverage uh through your the things you've been doing for the past 10 years hopefully you've been able to accumulate some people's names and connections and what they're able you know you know people in the industry even if they're not in the i t department these can be people to reach out to to say hey you work at this company does your i.t department have any openings do you know the person in i.t can you put in a good name can i send you my resume can you hand that off to them and and give me a gold star and that's one that actually might help more than your skill set we often say it's not what you know it's it's who you know and when you're hiring that's a pretty big thing who you know becomes something you can really leverage and even though you might be a little older than people they normally hire yeah but you know bob in accounting or you know fred and i.t or you know becky in in accounting and now you have a connection you have a personal connection to the company based on the company you keep and uh don't dismiss that i talk about and how to get a job in i.t with no experience that ideally you would need a formal education some industry certification some practical experience and that fourth element is so you know somebody who already works there i've had about 15 20 different jobs in it through the years some of these jobs were with going from company to company some of them are are where i moved from position to position within the same company the first job i got in i.t i didn't know anybody who worked in that company i'm as i've mentioned before i'm still not sure why they hired me but they did but every job i got after that all of the additional 14 or 19 jobs i got after that i knew somebody who worked there and it did not necessarily somebody i hung out with it was a professional knowledge of someone as somebody i knew in the industry somebody i had met before somebody i had i had some business dealings before but i knew them i had their business card we had talked before we could we would recognize each other if we saw each other on the street hey aren't you blah blah blah from that place yes yes i am you can reach out to those people and let them know i want to interview at this company and you work there any tips who should i talk to can i mention your name would you like to put in my resume because i don't think i've mentioned this lately if in many of these companies if as if an employee hands in your resume they get a finder's fee so there may actually be a financial advantage to hiring you if it's somebody you know so wouldn't that be great you get hired because you know them you they get money because they know you so that's a win-win so take advantage of those situations too i think those things together can kind of get over that ageism hump it's not something you'll find everywhere but if you do run into it it's nice to be prepared thank you thank you so much professor master and thank you for your wonderful programs they've been great thanks david i appreciate the call that's it's one of those where you kind of have to be prepared for everything i i sometimes you know i do this full-time but i sometimes think if i go back and do a job at a company doing this if i go do security work again um how's that going to turn out will they want to hire me um should i should i grow some hair should i look younger should i get a sports car so i like you know those i wonder about the ageism part of it uh maybe i'm overdoing it uh that's that's one of those situations where you have to wonder is that that going to work out for me we have to think about this as we get older in our industry once you get up to a certain level though you already know everybody in your industry and you kind of hop between companies because you know people that are already there but if you're not in the industry you aren't at that point yet so it's that that plus or minus uh there's advantages and disadvantages with that let's go to uh the atlanta area code 770 hi caller what's your name where he calling from my name is quinton and i am calling from atlanta georgia how are you thanks for calling i i'm very well thank you for calling excellent excellent i wanted to tell you first of all do not shade do not grow your hair i've been bald i'm only 33 and i've been shaving my head for 18 years never a bad hair day so yeah don't ex and never unless you cut yourself unless i cut myself shaving that's right but i wanted to let you know i wanted to say thank you for everything that you do i passed my security plus exam uh on the 29th of last month great i scored a 789 the first time i actually scored a 700 and i was very highly i was highly upset but i went back reviewed it some more configured focus on the pbqs with the performance-based questions and i nailed it on the second one nice congratulations thank you very much no no thank you thank you my question is uh i was thinking about going i'm kind of debating on what i want my first job to be just because i was going to do my ccna but my brother who actually works in information security at the congressional budget office suggested that i get my aws certification first and i said the cloud practitioner he said no no no he said we're going for the solution architect first first try let's get it and i said okay that's a bit aggressive he said i know he said but you can do it and i'm going over the cloud practitioner information just so that i have a a a base of information for it and then i'm going to go for the solution architect what are your thoughts on that that is certainly probably the hottest area for hiring in it right now is anything relating to the cloud um to the point that i have um two kids in college right now one that just i have three kids one that just got out of college with her i.t degree my middle son is getting a cloud computing degree uh and i kind of i pushed that i won't say i pushed him into it he wanted to learn it but i i was happy to hold the door open as he walked through that to get it it is a great field right now i was just looking at some of the job postings that are out there wanting that type of of knowledge and it's remarkable how many organizations at a very bright broad breadth of organizations is wanting that level of knowledge um it's one of those situations where the your brother's absolutely right there's there is a need for this type of knowledge out there i i don't think by the way you could have gone wrong with the ccna either it's just a different set of jobs associated with that if you want to go he said no no you that that's just warm you want to go hot and he said here's the hot right now and i to be fair you are in a uh a part of the country where there are just tons of i.t jobs around this huge organizations that need that level and you can go to the cnns and the weather channels and the um the transportation companies trains literally trains planes and automobiles in in atlanta for those large companies doing that type of thing you've got um i.t related companies in the area you've got financial companies in the area with e-trades you've got all of the the uh government agencies and federal agencies in atlanta just a huge uh you're in a great geography it's kind of what i'm saying so you you're you're in a sort of the best possible world of things combined together to take advantage of anything related to cloud computing as you've probably seen uh the and if you haven't you should probably go look at some of these job postings out there so go out to the indeeds and linkedin jobs and dice and and all of those and have a look at the jobs in your area and see what they're hiring just to qualify that yes you are absolutely working towards the right thing they will they will effectively point you in the right direction if you start reading through those um i would say anything in the cloud field is going to be on the people's top list of things because there's just not enough people out there that know how to do this i was working with a cloud computing company in atlanta um and this was a number of years ago but even they were struggling to find people that could help them with the orchestration side of things they had the technology down they were a cloud computing company but the the secret in cloud is not the setup the secret in cloud is making it dance and and the orchestration and the ability for your python scripting and understanding what to script and how to script it is perhaps one of the most uh sought-after skill sets in cloud computing right now so um i i think you're spot on you first you can't go wrong you pick pick like three things there that are highly sought after especially in your geography and there are things that you'll be doing literally the rest of your career so uh you'll always have that foundation to pull from and um and and the third part of that is you're in the geography where there's a lot of companies that want that and they're willing to pay you some good money for that so i'm i'm all in i give it a big check mark okay that's what that's what i was thinking because my initial plan was to get my security plus then do my ccna learn python and linux pretty much all at the same time and then go for the aws but since i'm doing this i do know that i still need to learn the scripting language and of course linux and ubuntu would be beneficial in the cloud computing space you you really can't go wrong a good strong foundation in linux a good strong foundation in um in anything python related uh for those of you that are not interested in cloud computing you're doing a ton of stuff in windows you can almost take the same id and apply it to powershell but getting a good foundation in python is extremely valuable um you are spot-on you got the right idea all of those those ingredients that you're putting into the pot stir around are exactly the type of thing employers are looking for and uh you probably won't find a single job that is able to pull from all of those at every level but they all work together they are the synergy between all of those technologies is there companies are just trying to find ways to take advantage of it and if you can somehow add that little spark to any piece of that then you're going to be very marketable in the job field very good thank you very much oh and one last thing i actually applied for a very entry level service desk position with my current role i work in finance and i've been doing uh like cards and card disputes and fraud for a few years and i was interested in i.t so i told them in my cup i put in my cover letter cover letter that i was studying for my security plus they requested an a plus and i told them i was just about to get my security plus they requested an associate's in business i have my bachelor's they sent me my denial letter and the next day i passed my security plus this is one of those situations though that that might be a very good denial i think uh i think you're you're destined for other things so keep doing what you're doing thank you very much have a great day best of luck quentin that's that's a good story right there all the right ideas all of the right things are going in place right there look at the combination though have you got linux your linux is such a strong foundation on the cloud side and i realize there's of course even as much a strong foundation these days azure has come on extremely strong so a huge windows emphasis almost every company is putting their microsoft technologies in the cloud so there is there's also places to go there if you're a windows person it doesn't matter what operating system you know but there's plenty of jobs out there doing the linux piece it's that python piece that kind of is the glue kind of sticks everything together it allows you to talk off to other these all of these other devices the last last job i had where somebody else paid me my focus was on next generation firewalls and my specialty there was integrating the api of the next generation firewall through different libraries different apis so being able to access that firewall through perl through python through whatever scripting language you could find to be able to do that it was a rest based system to be able to pull information from that device so how do you automate how do you orchestrate and how do you make the firewall bounce around you know especially in a cloud-based environment where it's no longer a physical device you're just spinning up software well how do you spin up that software with the right configuration earlier in this study group we did a firewall config imagine if you spun up a firewall but the configuration had to match the environment it was being spun up in it's going to be different every time so how do you automate all of those configuration settings that we made that was the idea behind that and it's really python that is that the industry has basically decided this is pretty good stuff we're gonna use this to make everything dance so i would if you're anybody who's interested in that world that's a great place to go uh back to florida folk go to south florida boca the 561 area code high caller which name are you calling from yeah hi professor messer this is a ed calling from miami lake it's ed miami lakes how are you sir i'm good how are you doing fine thanks for calling get a good south florida contingent today yeah well the reason i'm calling is uh because of the story that i read recently about a hack uh regarding solar wind oh yes and this was a supply chain hack this company did network security for fortune 500 companies and the federal government and it uh it happened by an attacker inserting malware in a patch or an update that they were getting ready to push out to their clients and as i was thinking about this i thought that you know it seemed like there were some tools out there that we already had that could have probably prevented this and what came to mind is like for instance when i download an app from the internet um like veracrypt for instance uh they post on their website a um a message digest or a um they use like md5 to hatch the file for the update sure and then when you download that uh file you run the same hash using the same algorithm and if your digest equals what they posted on their website then you know that it's uh it's the exact copy that you're supposed to receive so i'm wondering if if possibly when they created this update if they had that first of all uh in a secure say air-gapped situation where the server was air gapped and then they ran an algorithm like that a hashing algorithm and they came up with a a digest then they would know if if that was ever you know manipulated at any point and uh couldn't that have been used to prevent this kind of attack for most situations i would agree that that would be a perfectly valid way to at least ensure that the the code you had downloaded matched the code that somebody had posted on their website you would at least have some validation that you could do that those two things matched perfectly for this attack and i i i think it was last month or the month before i i sort of talked a little bit about this attack specifically and at the time it was one that had just been announced but it really had occurred much earlier it's been it's been in the work for months it was really only just publicly made available to the rest of us but i read through the report that was created that's really not giving us details yet and i don't know if if we're ever going to get all of the details but the one thing that i mentioned is that this was a really really really bad attack it's one probably one of the worst ones that we had ever seen in the industry and that's sort of that sort of sounds hyperbolic but it really i'm trying to give you some perspective on just how broad the scope of this is how bad the type of attack this was how invasive it was and who the victims of this attack are which are wide-ranging we were only discovering back then that oh yeah they got into the federal government had already created separate uh separate keys to be able to get into people's emails without them knowing and we're reading through all of the state department's emails without anyone even knowing they were there that's incredibly sophisticated but to your point about hashing and integrity and ensuring that the thing that you're downloading is the thing that was originally posted would not have helped with this particular attack because the attackers were not modifying code that was already compiled and ready for the end users they were modifying the actual source code before it was compiled so by the time it got rolled up for the end for people to download they had already injected all of their code into this this is this is what we've been able to kind of piece together we don't know the details behind all of this yet they're they're giving it to us in tiny little pieces um but this is one where they would have they were effectively the hackers were programmers for solarwinds and they went in and modified the actual source code so that when it all got rolled up and compiled their bad stuff was just stuck in there so even if at that point they would have created some type of integrity whether they had digitally signed the file whether they had created a hash for the file and digital signatures is how it's done most of the time if you get a microsoft update it's been digitally signed by microsoft so not only do you know it's the same file that microsoft sent to you you know it really came from microsoft there's non-repudiation associated with that same thing for solarwinds i'm sure they had non-repudiation set up for their updates as well just makes perfect sense the problem was the bad guys got their stuff in there well before the digital signature was made so it would not help the digital signature was valid it was a it was exactly what solarwinds sent down to you it's exactly what they posted on their side it just happened to be have the malware stuck inside of it and the malware itself and the way that it operated was just uh invasive and and uh very very intelligent and once it got in created the back doors and everyone was off to the races i can they must have had quite the setup where the hackers must have had quite the setup a whole boiler room full of people because you can imagine when that update went out you suddenly had had a hacked hundreds of companies immediately imagine one thing and suddenly a full access to all of these companies and and organizations and corporate entities and governmental entities and large companies they they now have the world at their fingertips uh just a massive horrible uh invasive hack that we still are getting stories i just got one in my email today here's what we found out this week of this particular hack this is going to go on for quite some time and we're still unrolling all of this parsing it we're still burning down all of these companies and building them back up again so we can be assured that we got rid of all the bad guys it's going to take some time and we're still in the middle of it yeah that's that's pretty crazy all right um you know i know that nothing's 100 secure anymore and i i keep thinking you know there has to be a way that okay i understand that they they corrupted the code prior to compiling it but what if they were to have when they're writing that code and storing that code putting that code in a more secure environment where it's it's not attached to the internet where they they couldn't get into the that data to begin with i mean isn't that a possibility yeah but now it's it's what it could have shoulda that's of course that they should have done it that way of course there should have been more secure controls over the code of course there should have been ways to prevent somebody from gaining access into that but they didn't and there's nothing in the world of of uh computing that would allow us out here as a customer to know what they're doing with their code we kind of have to trust them and to your point whenever you download code from the internet and install it you don't know what's in that code you're simply trusting that if you download it from microsoft that it must be okay if you're downloading it from google it must be okay if you're downloading it from apple it must be okay but you don't know you have no idea it's it's the whenever we talk about security is all based on trust ultimately this is what we mean um there are some people in the industry security professionals who will not upgrade the software on their computer until it has been vetted for months or in some cases even years before they even decide i'm not going to windows 10 i'm going to stay on windows 8 because i'm still seeing problems with windows 10 out there and things that people are installing and only then they're installing well installed well vetted uh updates to those operating systems and they won't install anything from manufacturers we i update things on my computer all the time there's automatic updates oh look there's another version of discord oh look there's another version of chrome let me install it i'm that person uh but i'm trusting that that code that i'm downloading doesn't have anything bad inside of it that's going to give people access to my device and unfortunately that wasn't the case with solarwinds uh yeah um i got one more question before i let you go sure if you could uh if you don't mind about backdoors um can you tell us more like exactly what back doors are how they're delivered how do you know if you even have one on your system and how are they accessed by an attacker this is there's no single way no single type of backdoor it's a very generic term when we use it this way and all it really means is once somebody gets on a system how can they be assured that they can get back in there again let's take the example of solar winds where they were able to take advantage of a vulnerability to gain access to an operating system on these machines but if you're normal companies and you find uh you want to you find that the update has come out microsoft has their monthly update um and you want to patch your computer those updates come out you patch your computer and now that vulnerability no longer exists if a bad guy gets into your computer with that vulnerability they're very concerned that you're going to patch it which means tomorrow when they try to get in using the same vulnerability they can't get in there anymore so the moment they get into that computer they start building a nest they they start taking up residence and one of the ways they take up residence is they try to find ways to gain access to the machine some other way because they know eventually you're going to patch this machine so they'll create maybe the back door is simply an account called professor messer with mine with a password on it and that's it that's their back door if they patch the machine that's okay i've got a legitimate log into that machine now and i can log right in fact my my login i created with a root login or administrator access so i've got administrator login on that device maybe instead they run an application that opens up a port that they're able to access using a remote desktop or remote control program that's their back door into that system the back door can take many different forms many different types it can be protected or not protected in different ways it can be an application that runs during a certain time of the day it can just anything that allows them to get back into that system without having to rely on the system being vulnerable they're effectively building their own screen door in the back that they have the key to and they can walk in whenever they'd like so basically what you're saying is they'll either set up the wrong credentials or they're finding what kind of applications you have on your system looking for vulnerabilities and then entering in that way the i think the vulnerability piece is how they get there initially that's how they they get in for the very first time but once you're in you don't want to have to rely on on taking advantage of a vulnerability to get in the second time because you're in now the hardest part is getting in the door and if you found a vulnerability to get you there now you need something a little more reasonable i think creating an account's a perfect example of a backdoor because an account's normal that account you can get to from the login prompt just like everybody else logs into that application or that machine some people will install a rat which is a remote access or remote administration tool where they can access it with a client from outside it just opens up a port number on their machine and runs as an executable and nobody even notices unless they do a process check in fact they might even name the executable sysconfig.exe which looks legitimate if you look at it in a process list but in reality it's opened up a port if somebody accessed it through that port from the outside they would effectively have remote control access to that machine and be able to do anything they'd like and they don't have to rely on a vulnerability to do that because now they have their own their own application doing it for them they are now set up on that machine they've taken up residence and now they can access it whenever they want even if you patch the machine that's pretty crazy stuff all right uh this is the problem we have with uh solarwinds yeah well hey listen i thank you very much for your time and uh your information sir thanks er best of luck thank you so one of the problems that we have with the solarwinds hack is that once they got in we realized they were doing all kinds of different things some groups would start downloading files some groups would start gaining access to email some groups would start setting up a pivot point and they would find other machines on the network and start taking up residence on those this is every every situation here was a little bit different these were these were not script kitties these were well uh well-funded knowledgeable hackers they this is the the creme de la creme of being able to find and hack and gain control of systems this was these these are smart people so now we have to we have to be smarter than them for most of these organizations they are deleting everything and starting over when something like this happens in your organization the only way to get rid of this is to delete every machine burn it to the ground and rebuild it either rebuild it with a brand new config or a known good backup that is the only way to do it now if you're a company with a hundred devices maybe that's not horrible but we're talking about federal agencies uh multi-billion dollar fortune 500 companies they have thousands of machines tens of thousands of machines in some cases probably more how can you imagine going through and deleting everything and bringing all of that back they're still working on that they're still doing those things uh quite a challenge let's go to the 404 area code back to atlanta thanks for holding for so long what's your name uh where are you calling from hey professor my name is kareem martin i'm calling from the atlanta metro area of duluth georgia yes you are thanks for calling okay i got two questions one may be kind of easy with the kind of hard the first one when you look at uh pen test plus being the core red team sisa plus being the blue team uh kompsa being the white team and that whole ecosystem of comptia now for security which is good and you look at how you can stack your certifications with cloud plus lens plus service plus etc and also um looking at the dod uh standard 8140 which used to be 8570 where when you look at there it's a list of those surprisingly pin test plus security plus it's all over there how do you think that ecosystem stacks up to say the amazon aws stuff compared to the azure stuff comparing maybe to some of the the uh cisco stuff maybe you know even some of the cissp stuff which you know cssp9 has four different uh levels one being one specifically for hospital information and lastly some of the apple stuff as far as we're not talking about price because i go back and you you want to understand to go back to the cssp days where that was all it is you took the test one place and took the lab somewhere else i mean i remember to this day i took the cissp lab in washington dc right so you know that's my first question how is how how do you think that uh comptia's security ecosys ecosystem stacked with linux plus server plus maybe uh cloud uh plus versus everybody else you know this is something we didn't even have what ten years ago when i when i started uh doing just hardcore security which was being a systems engineer for that next-gen firewall company um when i started there which was probably just over 10 years ago it's kind of surprising that it is that long ago all there really was was cissp and sort of a few derivatives around there and yes uh other firewall companies had their certifications and i just come from mcafee at the time uh network associates i had all those ph or pgp and uh gauntlet firewall certifications boy that's that's helping me right now that's you know at the time an amazing proxy based firewall uh fantastic capabilities the industry had never seen uh now of course does not exist in any way shape or form but we had sort of this uh ad hoc whatever you can get sort of security piece but we all really realized cissp was the gold standard and in some ways cissp sort of is still the gold standard but it has now been uh there's a lot more choices it's been watered down a little bit just in 10 years comptia has built all of these new security certifications for good reason the industry didn't really have a good focus on security from it from a validation or certification perspective and i think the big driver for this for better or worse was the u.s federal government they were driving comptia to find ways to make our federal government smarter with cyber security and i think they did a pretty good job as you just mentioned of laying out a structure that would allow people to learn these skills validate that they have learned these skills and be able to use these skills in an organization and it's not surprising that the government has added them to their list and is maintained in their list because comptia has done a very good job at finding lobbying creating and putting those into that list along with other companies as well because you've seen changes from palo alto networks you've seen changes from the isc squared you've seen changes from other individual companies and organizations with their own certifications and there's a lot more choices today than there ever was so i think comptia has done a very good job at kind of piecing together the structure um is it is it the structure we need and if you're going to compare it to anything you sort of have to compare it on the security side once you step outside the scope of security you look at the azure certifications the aws certifications um those are and even the google i t certification those are really good certifications but they're very specific to that niche and if you're going into a job that deals with cloud computing aws is a good thing to have and their their suite of certifications is good to know or if you're going into the federal government azure certifications is highly sought after people would love you to be have be knowledgeable in those but the security tends to still be uh except for comptia uh kind of out there and and hasn't changed that much there's still for example the ceh the certified ethical hacker which i've spoken of before i don't really hold it in very high regard um although it's it's one of these double-edged sort of uh yin and yang certifications for me because i like the content associated with ceh i just don't like the organization that provides it i don't i shouldn't say i don't like i've really never dealt with them i don't have i don't hold them in a very high regard given their past history um this is one of the things that that the industry is sort of figuring out at this point is we needed some some scope some guidance we needed some linearity and and linearity and find some way to kind of step step one step two step three step four because all we used to really have is uh security plus and from there you had to go to a manufacturer and get their cert which really was not a good scope at all now at least we can focus in on individual pieces and go after that if you really want to go into red team blue team security focus maybe the comptia certifications make a lot of good sense maybe focusing on some of the options from ise squared make a lot of good sense and now you have options but i probably would not swap those in and out for something on the aws side or azure side i think those are sort of standalone and have their own requirement i kind of look at those as if you're going into security you should already know this cloud stuff you should already be familiar with linux you should already know microsoft windows you should already have familiarity with active directory and how that security works you kind of need that foundation you also have to know the networking side so ccna even to that degree or even the ccna security stuff is a good foundation for those i kind of think of those as the starting point and then you layer on top of that the security pieces obviously that's not something that any of us would be able to do overnight but i think if you're looking at a five to ten year arc for your career i think building and pulling in all of those different and diverse certifications is going to make you a better technologist especially if you put the security pieces on top of it yeah i i agree with that um and before i throw my second question i just want to say i passed security plus this past january 15th and in my case i over half the exam i took was performance-based stuff and command line of all things wow and my multiple choice was truly multiple choice because just about everyone's first question i got had two answers that came with it right it's crazy the the second uh part of it i'm going to say uh i strongly agree with you on 501 being easy uh uh i think i said because how dare people that have taken it two and three times already uh also also um here's here's now this may be one of those controversial questions when it comes to pen test plus slash hacker and cisa being um policy in your humble opinion is it a chicken or the egg question to say okay when you talk about policy not enforcing it just writing it do you think the policy guys with the chip on their shoulder about thinking like a hacker and pen testers have it wrong because you had to be able to i'm going all the way back to the old school rainbow series before the o'reilly rainbow series with federal government and looking at where we are right now in 2021 to be able to write the python to configure the firewalls to like i'm just picking on comptia because you know saying this is sure what i'm dealing with right now but you take linux plus stacked with security plus with security plus stack with cloud plus not not talking about their cloud essentials plus yet but just that skill set and then you stack that with you to do the pins test side sisicide or you make it to the um casper side or you get all four you got security plus you got pen test fifa cloud plus linux plus server plus and like you just mentioned that's a that's a strong skill set but then you get to a policy person who i've met some people who skipped security plus and took sisa two or three times just to have sisa but then you say okay i understand your logic because you want to be a policy person but then when it comes show time and it comes you're interviewing for a job and look at the salary you can't be upset because in my opinion policy writers you can make a policy writer cooking you make someone who actually knows what you're doing on the command line and understand the technology that's just me not not belittling how hard you worked and you paid a thousand dollars to finally pass you know system not belittling that i'm just simply saying that is it the chicken or the egg situation you have to acknowledge the fact hey it started here you can get it the command line you can understand the operating system understand you know linux command line powershell uh the mac you know debian uh not that many but um uh bsd style uh command line stuff and then coming forward in the general ecosystem you know whether it's finance whether it's you know whatever give me your take on that this is uh uh something that has not changed since way back in the day and i don't see that it's gonna change much going forward either i i think of this uh in the perspective of auditors this is what i've i had to deal with in my past is uh we were technologists we were running the network and security and operating systems and desktops and weird then you bring in a third party to audit and the auditors start throwing out things that don't even make sense they they don't have practical experience in doing this but they do have this checklist of things and the checklist says that this is what you should do but you're not doing it in your environment um and like for instance you need to do this thing with linux then we'd say well we don't have that thing with linux well you need to do that well how am i supposed to do that if i don't have it well we're going to ding you on it you're not going to pass the audit because you don't have that thing am i supposed to just build a new linux machine with that thing on it because your audit says i should have that yes that's how that's how you should do it uh some of these things just never made sense to me it's sort of the same situation today when because we still policy writers and auditors and needing to check these things and they do fulfill an important part of this because obviously we're still getting hacked we the we were just talking about solar winds a massive massive breach and it's now harder than ever to stop these things from coming into the network we're trying to find new ways just to combat it just identify it is hard enough these days we're turning to machine learning and big data just to be able to find somebody trying to get into our networks we used to just be able to pull up an ips stick it on your network you could find everything well those days are long gone we're not even close to that anymore it's not even getting easier it's getting harder to do this so it's a it's a yin and yang situation again where we need some broad thinkers to give us some ideas about how would we get broadly protect what we're doing how will we keep this data protected how do we keep our users protected how do we make sure and keep the bad guys out but at the same time there's that practical side of it that often is overlooked or for whatever reason sometimes political is overlooked because they don't have to um and and and taking how do you fit real world with policy and it's one of those that if you're good at doing that and you really do have a good perspective of how those things work together you can go work for the largest biggest companies doing the security piece because you have a skill set nobody else seems to have you have a perspective that nobody else seems to have but there's always going to be a learning curve to get to that point and unfortunately very often we're having to work with people that are still in that learning curve to figure out the details it's uh it's one of those situations where i worked with a manager back in the day who was very smart with this who said he noticed that i was uh hard to believe i was very headstrong i was very confrontational when i saw dumbness i just whenever i saw people not doing things smart i was not i was definitely not good at at approaching or explaining my my unhappiness regarding that particular level of of dissatisfaction and he said look you're going to find uh political issues politics is going to be everywhere you go you aren't you're fighting it for some reason but you're not going to get rid of it so instead of fighting it why don't you learn how to work with it and find ways to make it work for you rather than against you and he was right like i needed to kind of take a step back get a little more well-honed in the nuance of the political situation of polit we call it politics but it's really interpersonal skills get a little more nuanced at how you can work with people better figure out their motivations see how you can work with their motivations to ultimately figure out how to make it work on your side and once you sort of can find a way to make those things happen and you kind of take more of your uh more emotion out of it and and be more practical this is why i never went into law because i'd be a horrible lawyer i'd be yelling at everybody in the in the in the courtroom um but if you could find a way to just take a step back out of your brain out of yourself and look at the big picture and not put any emotion into it and figure out how to make the chess board work a little better for you it ultimately works better for everybody and i think also taking some of the emotion out of it also makes you healthier it did for me anyway because this is not for most of us this is not a live or die situation we're working for an insurance company we're working for a car rental company we're working for um a department that does taxes um obviously i've i've worked with people that work in hospitals that work for uh military that work for the police they these are the fire department the 9-1-1 calls these are life and death and i'm not in any way saying that those are not because they absolutely are and there's there's needs and concerns and a reason to be passionate about those situations but for other where it doesn't make sense there's no reason to get angry and upset about that you should pick your fights uh the real important fights for the things that are actually really important and it is nothing you can kind of learn on a live stream or even in a set of youtube videos but it's more of finding a way to interact with the world as you go through your career that makes everyone happy you ultimately everybody gets what they need but you do it in a way that is much easier to go through the process it's um maybe it is a little ego maybe it's a little emotion maybe it's and everybody wants the right thing for everybody i don't think anybody comes at this with um wanting to to take over the world you're not looking to be evil you're just trying to make sure that all the data is secure that all the people are secure that the company continues to exist that you're able to get a paycheck at the end of the week but there is a need to be able to be pragmatic about it and that's one of the hardest things i often say that we have to be good at working with people in it the computer part's easy the computers are ones and zeros they do exactly what we tell them you give them the same question they give you the same answer every time that's a that's a that's a simple set of skills relatively speaking the hard part is the human interaction and if you become good at that you can do anything in this industry that's true too well my my final one to call it the daily double in your lifetime experience dealing with sock 2 type 1 type 2. why is it how many times you've experienced it where the sock one part the policy and the stock and the stock type 1 part the policy and the type two part have absolutely nothing to do with each other that half of the stuff that's in the policy has nothing to do with what's actually going on and he comes up have you ever experienced that now let you go thank you for taking my call sir i appreciate that that call how sort of leading a leading question happens all the time it's constant it's a constant constant battle uh especially when you get into organizations that are so segmented you don't don't see it much in small organizations that need to be nimble that have a very clear goal of what needs to happen and everybody is on board i think those are easier things to navigate but when you get into situations where it's a very large company and it's been split up into tiny pieces where their everybody has a task and that task is a narrow scope across all of this it becomes more of a challenge i'll give you an example this is more of a technical example but it kind of does apply towards policy and scope i was tasked to go in and install a firewall that interacted with active directory many of the firewalls do this these days so that if you're in the accounting department you can create a firewall rule that says if you're in the accounting department you can go to this server if you are not in the accounting department you cannot and the way that it determines whether you're in the accounting department or not is it looks at active directory to see if you are a member of the accounting department so there has to be this interaction and integration between the firewall and active directory so can you imagine an organization where there is a group of people that manages the network a group of people that manages security and the firewall specifically there's a group of people that manages windows there's another group of people that manages active directory which is different by the way than the group of people that manage windows and then there's another group of people that manages i don't know there's a third or fourth thing in there i think it was a hardware so i had to find a machine install a piece of software that integrated with active directory in windows and be able to have that device communicate to the firewall over the network so there were like four or five different groups in something that in my lab literally takes five minutes to install i had to integrate with five different groups schedule time with each of them get them in the room describe what we were trying to do have them tell me no i can't do that and then bring the other managers in to be able to override the fact that they were telling me no i can't do that so that they would finally give me a machine to put it on okay i got the machine now i need to put it in windows i need to install it in windows as an admin oh no okay we need to pull in the windows team to be able to install the software who needs to also talk to the active directory team to be able to have the windows talk to active direct can you imagine this took me all day to install a five minute installation and we hadn't even done anything with the firewall yet so it's a good example of how was that a secure environment that was a pretty darn secure environment it was really really secure because you couldn't get anything done it wasn't that security was good the security was awful but boy you just couldn't get anything accomplished so of course it was secure this happens all the time uh this is one of those situations where it's just a constant battle a push-pull but my perspective because at that point in my career i'm nothing surprised me nothing confused me of course it's going to take six groups who's next let's do the next one i was there for the duration we just need to figure it out okay who's next on our list bring him in all right how about this no well what is the process we go through to override that no well you need this signature and this person this person great we're gonna get that we'll go the next step and you just go through the steps until you finally get to the end and you don't get wrapped up and you don't get angry about it you don't get concerned about it it's that that's a that is the literal example of it is what it is we're just going to go through the process and however long it takes we will figure it out and at the end of it we will we will have the solution and eventually we did get it installed it did talk to active directory we got the firewall up and running it was able to integrate with active directory and they ended up being a customer so we we showed that it did what it was supposed to do we just had to go all the way around the barn to finally get in to see the horses but we finally did yeah um what you described people ask me all the time how can you be so calm you have to you ha it is not for the squeamish it's not for the squeamish at all because you will you won't be the i i can't even say you know because it's youtube but or what i've been saying if you're not a calm person who looks at like you just said okay we'll go do it not no oh my god if you're that person if the slightest thing causes you to go have a stroke level event you're in the wrong place because this is not where you need to be we have worked with those people before thanks kareem i appreciate the call yeah all right this is one of those situations though that you sort of you sort of get used to these things as you go through you start off with i was in a project and that was the hardest project ever and everybody says well yeah because you fought it the whole time uh and you'll think back and like yeah i would did kind of fight that the whole time how could we have done that differently and then you sort of evolve you figure it out over time that it's sort of the that that old saturday night live bit where you had the the i.t computer guy would come in move and he was just the angry just let me fix it um but you can't be that person you have to be you have to be the moderator you have to be the one that is that is keeping everybody straight you effectively have to turn you have to be the one in control for for as much as i complained that i hated being in it management that's what it management is even if you're not called a manager or director you're the one who has to be the leader you're the one who has to have those skills to be able to say all right well what do we need to do how can we make that happen there's got to be a way to make that happen right okay so how do we do that and did you go off to the races uh that's the way you do it it's south florida day so we're going back to miami 786 area code hi caller what's your name we're calling from hello how are you doing messi thanks for calling what can we do for you so i'm new to it and i just started studying for my security plus i've been watching your videos actually so far and doing it writing in our notes and i have derek gibson's book as well so i study that my thing is there's a lot of different ways against the field right like i know people that get into the field without a certification they just they just go into school and then their resume is good and they just get a job and then people that just have search and don't have a degree it's like so i'm just trying to figure out i'm in school uh also for information technology so um when i'm when i'm right now where i'm with my mind is that i'm thinking about passing the security plus and then i guess try to get maybe a pen test uh certification or maybe a linux but also i'm now i'm seeing itil i don't know if you know about itio so my thing is what advice could you give me when it comes to the right the right uh world to take after i get my security plus do you think i should get another certificate or try to get a job or this is one of these things security is kind of this hard world to get into and it's because there aren't a lot of entry-level positions in security and it sort of is a dichotomy with what we're being told or how we're being how i.t security is being presented if you look online you need to get into cyber security take our cyber security course we have a cyber security degree you can get that is one of the very broad descriptions of this the problem is that people don't tend to hire your first job your entry level position doesn't tend to be an i.t security position there just aren't a lot of entry-level positions because cyber security is a sort of a stacking of skills that would allow you to finally have a perspective of security we talked a little bit about this earlier you sort of have to have knowledge in operating systems networking um applications to some degree being able to to take all of the things you've learned with all of that as a foundation and then security is what you stick on top of it it's sort of the icing on the top of all of that i've often said in these study groups that i t security specifically for the most part requires you be effectively an expert in networking you need to understand switching and routing and dynamic routing protocols and how to troubleshoot routing tables and understand how to integrate these systems and understand how they all plug in so that you can start connecting all the security devices to the network so that's why you don't tend to see a lot of employers asking for entry-level security because there's not a lot of it but if you're in some geographies especially large municipalities you may find there are a number of entry-level security positions at something like a sock a security operations center the sock is a great entry-level type of job because you're you're really just getting the basics you're sitting there and monitoring the security systems that are in these organizations and you're kind of learning as you go you know nothing of what you're seeing you don't really understand how it got to the point where it got to you but you're starting to see the results of these monitoring systems for security and it's a great way to at least get that entry level spot the i often tell people as you mentioned pin test and it's a good example of this you're not going to find any pin test entry level there's no such thing as pin test entry level really and i say this in a very flippant way because there actually are people i know whose first job in security was as pin test but that is a rarity first there are very few pin test jobs to begin with and even fewer of those would even be something that an entry-level person could could go after that's changing a little bit because the industry needs more and more and more security people so our requirements are dropping a little bit for security and we're more willing to bring people in and teach them as we go which we just need warm bodies and we're running out of warm bodies and that's what happens when you don't have enough people to hire is you start hiring whatever you've got then uh we don't go to war with the the group of folks we we wanted we go to war with what we got so that's the situation we have with a lot of these security jobs now is it's actually a little easier than it used to be to find entry-level positions but it's still very hard you don't find them a lot i would recommend that you start building out a list create a spreadsheet of the security jobs in your area find out what they're looking for and don't go after the high-end security roles go after kind of what people would think of as the entry-level security roles go find the security roles that have people um working at a sock entry-level pin test entry-level i.t security entry-level sim entry-level whatever it happens to be firewall administration assuming you can find jobs like that put them into a spreadsheet find out what they're asking for what formal degree do they want what certifications would they like you to have what other skills are they looking for what um in what company certifications are they looking for find out if any of these match your skill set see if if you're on the right track with any of them maybe i'm wrong maybe you'll find that every single one of them wants you to have a pin test plus all right well that that tells your story now you know if everybody's asking for pin test plus i need to go get my pen test plus that's just one of the many things i'm sure that you will have to fill in in that list of things that may be the best way to approach it is this is a a constantly changing environment especially in getting a job and so you have to be able to react and see where the industry's going and unless you're monitoring where the industry's going you're not going to know where to go next from there i appreciate that advice professor i appreciate it absolutely i appreciate the call thank you one of the things that i always struggle with is how much things change and how quickly in this industry uh from the time when i started working as a systems engineer for this firewall company the time i left was a completely different job and it was only seven years i think during that time frame and it continues to change dramatically because of things that we see happening even after all that work we've done even after all that thought we've put into security we still have hacks like we've seen with solar winds and now we've got to readjust again there's a whole different set of things we're going to have to do just because of that one thing uh it's it's apparently today we're going to talk in florida hello caller from winter park 407 area code which name are calling from hi my name is james uh like your name is james as well um i've called in before and i don't know of anyone's asked it's a question already but uh would you recommend um someone studying for the 601 but instead taking the 501 to make the experience a little easier i i would not and and the reason is not because you know one's harder one's easier i think we can have a big conversation about whether that's entirely true i i think it's 501 is going to be much easier because of the size of it and because of the the number of resources available to study from but the exam objectives between those two are really really different half of the 501 exam is in the 601 study materials so if you studied the 601 study materials you went through all the 601 books you watched all the 601 videos you could get your hands on you studied everything you could possibly find about the 601. you went through the 601 exam objectives and you could check off every single one of those exam objectives you would still only know half of what you needed to know for the 501 because the 501 changed so much when it moved to the 601. security plus migrated and changed so much between those two so you'd walk into the 501 and you'd fail it you only knew 50 of what they were asking of you so that's why i often tell people pick one and then all of your study materials really need to match the version of the exam that you've chosen because those study materials are going to be very different with the topics the 501 topics and the 601 topics are very very different the emphasis is different there's a lot of things that have been dropped from this in the 601 i talked about the 601 being bigger but the reality is it's only half of what the 501 had in it so a lot of stuff they just threw out it's not like they took the 501 and then added 30 percent to it oh no they took the 501 threw out half of it moved that half over to the 601 and then added all new stuff so for someone like me who's creating content i'm having to build a whole new course it's all new content to put into this thing so i would definitely not recommend you do that okay yeah i did because i just bought out when i bought a couple books so i got some of them amazon for 601 but i might go and get your 501 materials and start studying that now it's about what you can get your hands on and if you go through the 601 books you like the 601 books and the content the 601 appeals to you there's good reasons to go with that certification and that's a perfectly valid perfectly reasonable reason to go with that if i was studying for security plus right now i might go with the 601 because it takes me six months to study for an exam like that i have way too much going on in my life to be able to cram it into three months and be comfortable with that i usually give myself six months when i'm studying for an industry certification so i can't make it by the deadline i'm or it's so close that i don't want to be pushed by that i don't want a deadline a retirement date for certification to dictate how fast i need to study for things so instead i would probably shift gears about this point about the march april time frame and maybe i'll start doing 601 that might make more sense for me other people need to get this thing done in a month or two months maybe 501 is a better choice for them so sometimes it's just about the calendar not necessarily about the content gotcha thank you for that yep i appreciate the call it's one of those situations where everybody's going to have a different story a different need a different requirement a different time frame nobody can really tell you what's best for you you're going to have to put all of those into a blender and figure out across all of those how do they correlate how am i going to make all of that happen because unless you do that you're not going to have the right answer although in the chat room you do make a good point right in the chat room says yeah but a deadline can really be a good motivator i know some people that will set their date to take the exam before they start their studies because they know if they they have to be at that date at that time that they will set up and really work on learning the material before that date arrives now the reality of course is you can reschedule your exam 48 hours beforehand so even if you weren't ready you could always push it out but that does give you some structure know you can put in a calendar and then you can set up every day here's what we're going to do every day and i get it because that's i've done things like that before and maybe the july 31st cutoff is right there will be people taking the exam on july 31st this happens every time there will be people taking their exam on the final possible day you could take it uh i don't recommend that that does that's not the best way to go about doing but it happens every time so this is one of those two you will see people doing that every time and maybe that's just human nature we wait until the last minute to get it in there and then hopefully we're able to make that it's july 31st is the last day to take the 501 so maybe that's that's the way you approach it to make that happen so figure out the way that works for you what motivates you uh for me it's uh it's it's problem motivation for me is not necessarily the date i think the motivation for me is to set just set up the structure based on what's going on in my world i just say it's gonna take six months that's the date let's go and we just work through it there you know sometimes i have a bad way that's that's not exactly an accurate way to schedule things because some things may be harder than others but you have to start somewhere and so for me it's a structure it's not necessarily banging up against a particular date or time to make that happen either way you're fine you're going to get a security plus certification you're going to be security plus certified that's it i know a lot of people will say yeah but the 601 is newer material on it and some of the material in 601 is newer not all of it is not all of the new material added is new stuff some of it has been in the security industry forever they just changed the topics the thing though is that there are people who are security plus certified right now that took the sy-0301 because once you take and pass the exam you don't take the exam again you're done taking security plus exam you don't have to take the exam ever ever ever again so if you were security plus certified 10 years ago all you have to do is just keep updating and maintaining your certification getting ceus taking the uh the cert master ce which is not an exam it's more of a cbt so you never have to take the exam again and yet they are just as security plus certified as someone who sits down today and passes the 601 so there really is no difference saying that that taking the 501 taking the 601 that you are better or worse than the other it's exactly the same result there is no difference in that now some people though it's personal like i want to learn the latest things i want to learn more about those frameworks i want to learn more about those cloud technologies i want to learn more about that side of things that's a perfectly reasonable idea perspective on certification and that's a perfectly reasonable way to go into the 601 exam makes sense to me there's no reason why you'd do anything different so pick what works for you for a number of people i need they need to get the certification quickly and they need to get it right now and there's a job pending because of it or i'm going to get fired if i don't get certified you should be taking the 501 right now there's no question like go get the 501 quick quick quick uh it's a much easier way to get through this get your cert and okay you're done so that's it's about situation it's all situational like anything else of course it's situational we'll we'll approach it in the way that makes sense for us find the way that makes sense for you and either way you'll be security plus certified and at that point as long as you maintain it nobody can take that away from you so it works for me that's that's the approach uh eventually for those of you wondering uh you asked in the chat room you noticed i've got about halfway almost halfway through the videos for 601. this is going to be 167 different videos 100 and something i've got the i literally have the spreadsheet up right now because i've been working on this uh but currently it's scheduled to be 176 videos um 84 of them have been published which is 47.73 um but more are in the can as they say i've got more here ready to be edited that goes well above half so in my mind i've already shot more than half of these videos so over the next month or so you'll see another you know 84 videos or so whatever the rest is get published out there but that's that's what we're working on now is getting those out to make that happen so it's it's a lot of videos a lot of content the 601 exam there's a lot of stuff so that's that's kind of the way it works is making that happen that brings us to the end of another study group uh it's i always love doing the security plus study groups it's always a topic that's sort of close to my heart because that's uh it's kind of where i was in the industry prior to doing this full-time so the always fun to see what's happening in the industry and what people are doing with it and the new security plus is a lot of fun too there's a lot of great new topics in there and a lot of good things to learn so we're going to learn them together as they say we're going to go through the entire process together and then for the next number of years we'll be learning this content always something different always something new and then uh in the meantime we've got all of the 501 we can keep working on until july 31st and if you're working on that keep going keep going keep going you can do it and we'll get through both of these together as always if you have any questions you can always hit me on my website the contact us link is at the top or the bottom of the professor messer website check the calendar for the next study group event make sure you sign up for the notification list so you'll know what'll be happening and uh if you like the study group today make sure you click that thumbs up on the video we'd love for you to subscribe to our channel as well thank you for being here we will see you next time on the security plus study group you

Channel: Professor Messer

Views: 15,963

Keywords: security+, professor messer, study group, comptia, information technology, certification, security+ training, security+ certification, security+ professor messer, security+ exam, security+ 501 questions, security+ performance based questions, security+ course, security+ practice questions, security+ review, security+ questions, security+ profesor messer, security+ perfomance based questions, security+ pratice questions, Security+ reveiw

Id: L0wxhe4uZ-Q

Length: 174min 44sec (10484 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 24 2021