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

there we're live hi everybody just getting the headphones on just getting things ready for the live stream thanks for being here i need to pop open the chat hello chat room we can pause this let's pop this out kind of see what i do here in the beginnings of this we'll get stream health so we know what's going on hi everybody let's check uh recordings we are recording down here i'm recording over here that looks good cameras look all right they look okay they look like somewhat ready to go i think we're in good shape i think we are in fine condition with that let's see how uh the stream is going we got some viewers hi everybody welcome in welcome to the show oh hello canada welcome hope things are going well up there we have some family on the east and western parts actually central parts we have cam family all over canada so we hear from the the folks up there from time to time we are in constant communication so it's nice for you to check in as well we've got uh the security plus this is security plus study group everybody i mean this isn't the study group this is the pre-show for the study group we'll say that so we'll get there hello new york city and scotland in london and india and singapore palestine and whoever else would like caribbean and whoever else would like to check in got a little bit of everything going on uh st vincent nice good to see you again uh texas is here hello texas the um the interesting part i think scotland was the last big trip i was able to take before everything kind of shut down that was uh that was great trip hello tamper new york tennessee illinois is here ecuador hola we've got lots of folks checking in from all over the place this is one of those uh nice parts about doing this is i can just kind of turn on the camera and hear from tennessee and israel and michigan and charlotte new york and more of this and more of the caribbean and more of dallas texas and more of new mexico and india i love it love it love it thank you for being here thank you so much for being here i got a burning question about the pipeline ransom i don't know if there's much that we even know at this point we know just what they've told us which is not very much right now and i and what we think it is i guess we'll know a lot more later on but the whole that whole thing is just an interesting interesting thing happening there there's i-7585 in atlanta metro welcome monterey thank you for being here fort bragg welcome the um the good part is uh they were able to get the pipeline you know continuing to go they got it back up and running i don't think the pipeline was ever down i think they took it down out of a just concern that there would be a problem with the industrial equipment or maybe they did have a problem we don't know we don't know yet there's not enough information in well here we're here more maybe when this is all over with what we do know are the results of what it was what happened what happened with dark side and or or what didn't happen so very interesting and of course all the the dumb articles that come out afterwards it it i have that that working theory that some of you have heard before that there is if you ever read anything in a article i guess i could put maybe there's a there's a tweak to that theory maybe that is not written by a security online or security periodical but anybody else gets it wrong every time and this was another example of that is half the things i was reading weren't weren't accurate at all they were they were making up things because people who write uh people who are journalists for these things are journalists they're not technical people they're not cyber security experts so you know they try to try to get and then they try to get it across to people in a way that they think would be explained to me like i'm five and in the conversation and the translation and everything that happens during that process it ends up being just wrong or it's an article just written for click me click me click me which isn't any good either that's that's the way it goes all right presentation looks good i think we're in good shape here i think we are we're gonna find out uh how can this be used towards your continuing education unit credit you can earn one hour of a webinar category continuing education unit credit for watching sometime this first hour i will explain how you can do that i think most people are not collecting ceus anymore i think most people are just doing the cert master ce and and get and renewing in a few hours and they're done with it it's just way much it's a lot easier it's slightly more expensive i think instead of 150 dollars to renew it's 200 or maybe it's an extra 50 or an extra 75 there's an extra premium on top of it but you're done in a few hours that's the part that's crazy so that's that's the way it goes um four minutes to go four minutes and we'll this is not the show for those of you tuning in for the first time this is not it you will eventually see me on the screen i will be talking to you but this is the pre-show we'll start here in just a few minutes absolutely get this going do not worry we will make sure we get all that happening ah so hopefully it's been good in everybody else's world it's kind of a crazy world ah let's see how we're how we're doing here um 20 plus years of web design you want to get started in networking which is great because networking is kind of the foundation of everything in i.t and you sort of have a jump on a little bit of that i would think network plus is a great first day certification for networking although people who are hiring don't generally hire people who are just network plus certified they're usually hiring a plus and then eventually you're working into a networking role so that's it that's sort of the ideas behind it is is making that happen so we'll see we will see how it goes is there much difference between the 501 and the 601 there's a remarkable difference there is a ridiculous difference um only half of the 501 information was brought forward into the 601 and after that the 601 was expanded another 30 percent in size so it's a massively large much larger a third larger than the previous version and of the information that's in there less than half of it is from the old exam so yes you do not i'll explain this at the beginning is you would not want to study for the 501 and then go in and take the 601 exam that would just be crazy that would be a waste of your money because you would fail and that would not be good same thing you don't want to study for the 601 and then go ahead and take the 501. don't mix and match never never mix and match there's always enough difference in the versions that you would fail if not fail but you would do very poorly it's not guaranteed fail but you're you're setting yourself up for failure if you do that so there you go that's what it is if you've been studying for the 501 for three months you have to test july should you wait to take the 601 no no take the 501 please quickly 501 doesn't uh retire until july 31st so keep studying you've been staying for three months the 601 is so different it's like starting over don't do that what parts of the 501 go on to the 601 well for that you will have to go and figure it out you'll have to go and look at the exam objectives for both there is a lot of things that have been taken off there's a number of things have been added too it is a big mix of things it's a lot that's different so we'll see we'll see how this goes as we step through it yeah if you're st and if you're studying for the 601 just keep studying for the 601 but if you've spent five you've been through three months studying for the 501 why would you start over if you bought the 601 notes will they help with the 501 no they will help with the six so what now i think you folks are just messing with me that's what this is now you're just now you're just causing problems um let's see if i can start my keynote let's see if i can get a green light i do that looks good this looks good the clock is getting close to the top of the hour and there it is it is time is there a complete study material for six and one on my site there absolutely is and why wouldn't you look at that that's where you should be let's get things started everybody let's see if that's the right button hello everyone welcome to the may 2021 professor messer security plus study group this is our 601 that is the sy 601 security plus study group where in this first hour i will ask you questions that come directly from the sy0 601 exam objectives and you as you are here online and live we'll see how well you remember all of these things it should be interesting to see how this goes we've got plenty to go through i have questions for everybody there's a lot to pour through the way that you can participate if you are watching this live is you can pop open a new browser window and go to this link professormesser.com qa that's the link you want to go to professormesser.com qa and uh it is uh quite quite remarkable what is waiting for you there there is a a message a question waiting for you if you put that in right you'll see it it's there now there's also an app you can get for this the app is the socrative student app because we use this service called socrative to do this interactive q a it's the socrative student app they will ask you for a room name if you use that app that room name is professor messer all one word p-r-o-f-e-s-s-o-r-m-e-s-s-e-r so make sure you are up to date with those and if you do all of that right there's a question waiting for you and the question says which of the following would be most associated with ais would that be sticks and taxi zero day attacks syslog data exfiltration or an encrypted tunnel which the following would be most associated with ais is it sticks and taxi zero day attacks syslog data x filtration or encrypted tunnel now if you think you know the answer please don't answer in the chat room you want to go the link that's on your screen go to professormesser.comqa and lock that in and we'll come back to that question in just a moment well thanks for being here everybody we like to do one of these study groups at least once every month and this is our monthly security plus study group we have other study groups that we do throughout the month for a plus and network plus and other things as well we have plenty to go through there's also of course lots of videos you can look at if you're taking your sy0601 we have a full and complete video course available for you to watch for free on my youtube channel no registration required there's nothing held back there's no paywall there's nothing you need to do just go out to youtube and watch it go to professormesser.com youtube i also have a weekly security plus pop quiz question i post to twitter professormesser.com twitter and of course i have the instagram option as well if you like the instagrams so that's always good as well there's plenty to step through with these and if you are someone who is working through your certification for security plus you'll notice right now there are two exams that you could choose from now you only need to take one of these you could choose the sy0 501 or you could choose the sy-0601 the sy-051 was released in october of 2017. it retires at the end of july so as we are here on may the what is this the 19th so you've got june you got about two less than two and a half months to study and pass that exam now if you've already been studying for the 501 keep studying for the 501 take that exam it's much smaller therefore much easier to pass so you do want to probably take the 501 it's going to be an easier deal for you the certification as soon as you pass it is good for three years even though they're retiring the the questions on july 31st your certification as long as you pass that 501 is good for three years they could change the exam every day you'd still be certified for three years that's good to know there's a newer version of this exam they update the exam about every three years so the latest version of the security plus is the sy-0601 it was released in november which means it will probably retire somewhere around may of 2024. so if you're studying for the 601 you have plenty of time before you would ever run into that but if you're watching this on a replay and you're getting close to may of 2024 you may want to have a look at that make sure that you're up to date with everything you would need to know now regardless of which exam you choose it's it's practically identical well let me first say before we go past this the 601 is a dramatically different exam i have a video on my youtube channel that is why you should not wait for the sy0 601 exam i did this video well before the 601 was released but so much has changed more than half of the exam is different they only pulled half of the information from the 501 and then increased the size of the 601 by 30 percent so very little of the 601 seems to to look like the 501 it's about a half and half kind of thing a little bit less but but we'll say half and half just to make it easy to say so dramatically different that means do not use 501 study materials if you're planning to take the 601 exam do not use 601 study materials if you are planning to take the 501 exam make sure that your study materials match the version of the exam that you're planning to take that's an important consideration make sure the study materials that you are using are exactly the same version as the exam you are taking otherwise you're putting yourself at a disadvantage right out of the gate why would you do that the exam itself whether you take the 501 or 601 is a single exam you have to pass 90 minutes in length you could get a maximum of 90 questions at a passing score 750 on a scale from 100 to 900 and it's a combination of multiple choice and performance based questions um and as matt in the chat room who's also donated 4.99 in the super chat thank you for your donation says i passed the security plus today he took the 501 congratulations did network plus and a plus recently your videos and notes were essential thanks any plans to do ccna i got plans for a lot of things i got lots of plans um will i ever do the ccna i would love to do more ccna i had had some study materials for the older version of the ccent it would be great to add on to those but right now we are focusing on getting all the security stuff out and being able to have all of those things there so matt congratulations on your 501 and your network plus and your a plus congratulations for those that is fantastic i always like to hear those great stories um and that's a hard one to to get through the security plus is a hard exam the 501 is a hard exam 601 is a heart exam as well so it's always good to be able to have those there there is also my 501 and 601 course are complete and available on the website so it doesn't matter which one you're studying for i have a study course for you the videos are out there and available for you in fact if you wanted to get everything i have for the 601 i have bundled it all into one single success bundle this comes with my course notes and my exam hacks and my study group q a all the videos you can download everything that's in the video you can download mp3 versions of this it's all out there so plenty to be able to look through you can find that at professormesser.com601sb so that would that would help you of course if you're planning to do anything with the 601 exam there is a video replay version of this available immediately afterwards on the professormaster website and on youtube you can of course find all of that there is also um a podcast version and audio version of this available professormesser.compodcast there's also links there to a plus and networkplus and all of my other study groups as well a great way to have these automatically show up on your mobile device you can listen as you're traveling as you're working out just another way to listen in to the study groups about a day later after we finish this live event you'll notice that the youtube video description will have time stamps next to it those time stamps have the information about what we did when we did it and we're able to put those on there thanks to my marketing manager lori who's watching this in the replay everybody say hi to lori lori is going through and putting timestamps for all of this she's watching it at 2x speed trying to get through the whole thing trying to figure out when the time stamps are she puts everything in there so you've got plenty to go through uh hopefully that will help you as you're looking at this you can find that at professormesser.com youtube i will also mention for those of you that are working on your security plus exam number of you've noticed on the pearson view website costs a lot to purchase a security plus voucher it's like 370 dollars here in the u.s why wouldn't you buy it for less and you can do that on the professor messer website where i've discounted vouchers already on my site you don't need a voucher code you don't need a coupon you don't need to play any of those games it's just discounted for everybody everybody gets a discounted voucher you get a discount voucher and you get a discounted voucher and you get a discounted voucher just go to professormester.com vouchers and you'll be able to download or at least see what the options are for a plus network plus security plus i'll probably put some more on there as well because a lot of you have said you're taking other exams you would also like some discounted vouchers for those so maybe i'll add some others this weekend to the list but of course you can get a discount of voucher a lot of places perhaps not as discounted as mine are but i also wanted to add a little bit more to it so if you purchase a voucher from my site you also get my exam hacks ebook this is a set of 14 or so life hacks that will help you as you're planning to take the exam it gives you some hacks you can use while you are taking a comptia exam things that might give you a few extra points and things you can do afterwards if you don't happen to do as well as you might have hoped all available there and you can find it at professormuster.com vouchers these are to take the exams only they do not apply to currently to the cert master any of the other products on the comptia website that is all about comptia in those regards well let's let's talk about that question we saw earlier which was which of the following would be most associated with a i s and i had a list here that you could look through that list said sticks and taxi zero day attacks syslog data exfiltration or encrypted tunnel and if we look at the results we can see that 50 percent of you say sticks and taxi it doesn't even make sense what is that what is a sticks and taxi we'll find out at the moment won't we because 18 said syslog 15 said data x filtration 15 percent said encrypted tunnel practically a three-way tie for second and then way back in third place three percent said zero day attack so if you see ais it's referring to automated indicator sharing which is just another acronym that we needed we did not have enough acronyms in information technology so we added a few more this one automated indicator sharing is talking about how we can share thread information automatically automate it have it move between different locations be able to send it to somebody else and we do that through a set of standards the standard for the the actual information that we are sending is in a structure called sticks which is structured threat information expression i guess s-t-i-e wouldn't have worked we had to put the x in there the way that you send this sticks data well you put in a taxi of course aren't we cute and adorable is the trusted automated exchange of indicator information taxi i can't even remember all these the names of everything you just get used to saying sticks and taxi that you never remember what the sticks and taxi means so that might help a little bit if you go uh to your exam you're trying to figure out what all of this ais stuff is about well it's about sticks and taxi and if you answered a sticks and taxi 52 of you got that one absolutely right well done on that multiple choice based question one of the things that many of you may not even be aware of is at the beginning of your exam you will get a handful of questions that are not multiple choice-based questions they are performance based questions they're questions that could ask you to perform a function at a command line they might present you with a drag and drop maybe a graphical view maybe you have to put things in a particular order maybe it's a matching question but it's anything but a multiple choice question so one of the things that we do on every one of our study groups is the very first new question of the month is always a performance based question so i've created for you a matching question this matching question in a similar style to what we have traditionally seen on the security plus exam this particular question has uh well we'll just jump right into it i want you to do a matching question which matches the attack with the description this is something you will have to put in on your side you can almost see everything that's on the screen so let me let me tell you what we've got here is on the left side we have four attacks we have spam watering hole smishing and harvesting those are four technologies slash attack types and then i have six different descriptions so two of these are going to be left over at the end this makes it a little bit harder doesn't it so the first one is a malicious website script uploads a password file to the attacker attack description b is a text message provides a link for tracking a shipment description c is an attacker walks behind an employee through the front door description d is an unsolicited email promotes a cryptocurrency description he is content from fake users is posted to social media and the last one is a credit card processor is infected with malware now those are the six descriptions obviously we're only going to use four of those so if you happen to know what the last two are you can maybe put those in for a little bonus get bonus points you don't usually get bonus points on your exam but i'll give out some bonus points if you get it right if you want to answer this please don't answer the chat room you want to go to professormesser.comqa that's the link that is right there on your screen go to that link and lock in your answer if you think they're already in order just put in 1a2b 3c4d and hit enter you're done see how easy that was that's not the answer by the way but at least you've got some things to work through if you're ever trying to figure all of this out as you're probably aware on the 501 and the 601 lots of attack types lots of technologies you need to know about but you need to know more than just the description of the attack type you need to understand how to recognize that attack type so that's what this is about is us trying to recognize what that happens to be now as people in the chat room are mentioning what if you get three of them but not the fourth do you get partial credit well comptia has told us on uh on their website that they could possibly give you partial credit or maybe they won't that's that's not a word for word quote from the website but that's a good paraphrase of what they put on their website which is there may be times when they do provide partial credit there are other times when they don't so i guess we can take away from this that if they give partial credit this would be a really good time to do it don't you think this would be a perfect type of question to give partial credit to i get partial credit but but what good does that do for anybody that doesn't matter it doesn't matter what i do it's it's what comptia does uh but that's that's the thing we just don't know there's no way to know comptia doesn't share their grading mechanisms with us we will never know if that's the case the only thing i can say is do the best you can and at the end of it it'll work out that's all i can really say that's all i know because i guess i could say more but at this point it's coming from a point where it's behind a wall it's behind the screen we don't know what happens back there we just know that if we do well enough in our exam we'll be able to do this so we'll see let's see how you did with this let's match these attacks with these descriptions and let's start with spam spam should be attacked most of us probably recognize so if you receive an unsolicited email promoting a cryptocurrency this would be the wrong day to promote that wouldn't it this would this would be a bad day to promote cryptocurrencies um but those are the types of emails that certainly look feel and act like spam you didn't ask for this email you didn't subscribe to something that gave you this email it was completely unsolicited it just showed up in your email and it was trying to sell you something so promoting a cryptocurrency is a very good example of spam especially since it was sent by email that's your link there unsolicited and email equals spam second on our list is a watering hole water and hole that is where you would have everybody from many places coming to a central point to become in this particular case infected and a good example of that is a credit card processor if you can infect the credit card processor everybody who's trying to get approvals for credit card transactions is all coming to the credit card processor the credit card processor is the watering hole we're all coming to the watering hole to try to get that approval if they can infect the watering hole then everybody who shows up goes away infected so it's a great way to get everyone with that infection a credit card processor infected with malware certainly speaks to a watering hole it's the only answer in these descriptions that i gave that made any sense whatsoever so that's a very good example of getting everyone infected from the watering hole you answered two watering halls if a credit card processor is infected with malware third on our list smishing smishing smishing's sort of like phishing except with sms of course it's with a text message which means the answer would be b a text message provides a link for tracking a shipment have we all gotten these at this point i think we have i think we all got an email that says you're you're a federal express they even say federal express your fedex package your ups package your package from amazon is delayed that happens to me all the time well i i didn't ask for any text messages and if you were to click the link in the text message it would ultimately take you to probably a phishing site asking you to put in your amazon id but it's not amazon just looks like amazon always be very careful of links that you get in text messages just as you get links and emails you should also be very careful there as well oh any link just be be careful of any link there we should just say say it that way and last on our list was harvesting harvesting is when a malicious website's grower an example of harvesting is when a malicious website script uploads a password file to the attacker so if on your machine whenever you go to a site you say you log in it says would you like to save your password well of course i do i don't have to type that in every time so you save in your browser well it's saved somewhere and the although it's saved in many very often that's saved in a protected form in an encrypted slash password protected form bad guys can still go through it and try to do some brute force so that's a good example of grabbing a password file grabbing information about people's authentication and pulling it off and maybe taking it somewhere else to perform some processing that is a good way to do it and that is certainly considered harvesting as they are going out and trying to harvest all of those username and passwords now i mentioned we would have two left over at the end of this the two that we have left over is c an attacker walks behind an employee through the front door and e content from fake users is posted to social media so i said bonus points if we can figure out what these things are and if we go to see an attacker walking behind an employee through the front door that's not good that's tailgating so that would be something we always have to look out for if you're ever working in an environment like this there's usually signs right there by the door that says one person at a time do not allow tailgating don't allow somebody to come through when you open that door in fact there's many places i have worked where you had to if you maybe 10 people behind you you badge in you open the door you go inside you close the door and then the next person can do that sort of a a self-managed access controlled vestibule did i use the right terms i think i did uh that is one that that you do have to watch for and certainly a an easy way for bad guys to get into your facility and lastly content from fake users posted social media as an influence campaign this happens all the time once you start looking for it you can find it very very very easily if you if you try to stay keep an open mind try to be objective about what you're looking at online you look at something you think wait a second i think that's probably an influence campaign so that's what you would run into is an influence campaign content from fake users posted social media is one aspect just one tiny piece of the entire influence campaign and i talk about all of those in my video about influence campaigns i have videos for all of these of course you can step through all of those section 1.2 of the video series i think has everything you would need to know about those attack types hopefully you were able to match those up pretty good i saw in the chat room some folks saying i did pretty good two out of four four to four uh one out of four but the good part of this is if you get any of these wrong this is a great opportunity it's actually really good if you get these wrong kind of a bad thing to say isn't it but the idea is you're getting it wrong now so that you don't get it wrong in the exam so that's what the good part about this happens to be is you can of course get these right get these wrong but if you're learning something along the way then we're doing pretty good that's your performance-based question of the month hopefully that helped you as well so let's now uh go back to our our multiple choice based questions i have some available for you the next question on our list is a question about wpa3 and it asks which of the following is used to secure wpa3 psk authentication would it be sae ccmp wps tkip or cbc mac which of the following is used to secure wpa3 psk authentication is it sae ccmp wps tkip or cbc mac if you think you know the answer lock it in at professormesser.comqa please do not put answers in the chat room please do not put any hints in the chat room we will figure it out as we go through all of this so this is one where if you're ever going through the process of working with wireless networks and trying to kind of break down the differences and the the how they would operate there are nuances and this nuance is an important one so make sure you're familiar with all of these different options now for those of you working on security plus this could be your very first certification exam very often people coming to my website security plus is often the very first one because employers especially for the u.s federal government love for you to have your security plus as a primary so that's why you'll see a lot of people taking and trying to pass that security plus for a job either with the federal government or one that works with the federal government especially in the northeast united states very very common to see that particular thing that's that's why we have a lot of emphasis on security plus on my site uh very very important uh have i ever got a virus i'm assuming you mean computer virus yep uh of course there throughout my career i have both gotten viruses and helped to remove and clean up for many different viruses do you have a family you've got a virus that's that's how that works for most of those let's see how well you know this wireless security and the wpa3 psk whatever that is we'll figure this out in just a moment the question again was which of the following is used to secure wpa3 psk authentication is it sae ccmp wps tkip or cbc mac if we look at our results uh we're all over the place 34 of us say tkip is what is used to secure wp pa 3 psk 24 said sae a tie for third place between ccmp and wps was 17 apiece and lastly it's 7 percent is cbc mac well the wpa3 changes things quite a bit wpa3 is well it's obviously different than wpa2 it's an upgrade to wpa2 and one of the things that we changed with wpa3 is the authentication process especially the authentication process with pre-shared keys or psk pre-shared keys is when you set up a single passcode or password for your wireless network and anybody who comes to your house you say oh you need the password to get in the password is and you give them the password to be able to make that happen so this is where you would make this this change to wpa3 changes the way we do this authentication it is able to set up a session key between two devices without actually sending that key across the network so you there's an issue with wpa2 that there's a handshake that takes place back and forth and if you can grab the hash from that handshake you can then perform an offline brute force attack from that hash well let's remove that hash from the design completely and not even send a handshake don't send any hashes there's no opportunity for brute force because we have completely changed how wpa3 works we've effectively added forward secrecy to wpa3 and so now we don't have to worry about somebody performing this the way that we're able to make that happen is through adding a new method of performing this authentication called a simultaneous authentication of equals an s-a-e why isn't that like oil i think it is this is sort of diffie-hellman-like if it sounds like diffie-hellman that's because this is sort of like diffie-hellman it just has an extra component in there for authentication on both sides so that you know the person that you're exchanging the key with really is the person that you were intending to exchange this key with that way nobody can sit in the middle and do an on-path attack everybody would then get a different session key even if they're all using the same pre-shared key everybody gets a different session key this makes it much stronger it's part of the standard itself if you hear somebody saying oh that's dragonfly yes that is but dragonfly is not a good term to use that's just sort of a uh something we use to kind of describe it uh in a in a very easy to remember way but the the official more technical term for this is the simultaneous simultaneous authentication of equals sae i'm glad we're using abbreviations in this case which means in our answer s-a-e is the correct answer if you answered a 23 percent of you got that one correct that is the one that you would have there it would not be tkip tip used with older types of wireless standards uh and in in different ways and in many ways tkip is ones you would not use because there are some vulnerabilities associated with tkip another good reason to upgrade to wpa3 and having having that capability would not be ccmp that's what we have in wpa2 would not be wps which is a method of authenticating that is not using pre-shared keys but instead using usually pins to be able to do that and then cbc mac is also not a method it's a block method and an authentication that we would have not said only some percent of you chose that but not something that you would use with wpa3 psk so there's where i think it helps to know sae 23 of you is absolutely correct with that if you answered the secu the simultaneous authentication of equals it's all equal then you got that one absolutely right and it's a welcome thing to have for working in a wireless network these days wpa3 adds a lot of new and useful features and that is just one of them to be able to have that there so let's also now that you've you're kind of got familiar with our multiple choice based questions let's do another one i have another multiple choice based question which asks which of these best describes authentication that is genuine with high confidence would that be hashing integrity counterintelligence e-discovery or non-repudiation which of these best describes authentication that is genuine with high confidence would it be hashing integrity counter intelligence e-discovery or non-repudiation if you'd like to lock in your answer do it the link at the bottom of the screen professormesser.com qa lock in your answer please no answers in the chat room please do hints in the chat room to have that there as well this is also if you're ever looking through the questions you would get on the security plus exam these types of questions that don't give you a direct uh answer question answer this is an unusual one where you're asked a very direct question with a very direct answer very often on the exam what you end up finding is that the questions themselves are a little bit more involved sometimes not as much one of the things that i found to be a little bit different on the 601 is that the questions are not quite the uh the tome the diatribe the the ongoing paragraphs of information they did sort of shrink down the questions to be much more concise but still have them pretty difficult they're still not trivia questions for the most part most of the time the questions do require one or two steps to get through to get the final answer or they're pulling in different ideas from different parts of the exam and putting them into a single question which i think is a great way to do it it's really testing you on what you really know about these technologies and maybe how sometimes they interact with each other and that's of course what you find when you start working with security is that that's exactly the scenario you run into in fact you usually run into security and networking sort of pushed into one big problem to solve this is this is where at least if you start getting into it and and trying to figure out the details um that's one of the things that that you will certainly find as you go through this um is it wrong if you're taking the 501 tomorrow instead of the 601 no if you've been studying with a 501 take it it's much easier much easier exam to study for much much shorter exam to study for i think the difficulty level is comparable on the exam but it will take you much less time to study for 501 than it whatever for the 601 and you get the same certification now you get exactly the same piece of paper at the end of it whether you take the five or one or six at one so why not why not do the easier one take the 501. i think that makes more sense if the a plus cert well passing the 501 renew it passing a number of different exams will renew the a plus and that is one of them certainly so that will help you as you go through this number of you have uh have worked on this so let's see how you did with this one that asked which of these best describes authentication that is genuine with high confidence is it hashing integrity counter intelligence e-discovery or non-repudiation 41 percent of you say it's non-repudiation 27 said hashing 25 said integrity which is pretty close to the same number we'll call that a tie and then way down here counterintelligence four percent e discovery one percent practically no one answered that if we go with the non-majority but at least a plurality of you said non-repudiation 42 percent of you i think we'll go with that at least and see if that's right is it right let's have a look the answer is indeed non-repudiation the the difference between non-repudiation and other types of verification or authentic authenticity authentication really and what's going on the other side is that with non-repudiation the person who is receiving this message knows that it really came from you and in fact anybody else who wanted to confirm that it really came from you could also confirm that so you've got quite a bit to go through with non-repudiation uh it is a very very um specific way to say it real not only really came from this person and we're very sure it came from this person we also know that everything in here that they put into this message is exactly the way they put it very very detailed with this we call this genuine with high confidence because anybody uh could have sent this data but everybody can check to really see where it came from uh and that that's why whenever we start breaking these out that means that we really understand sometimes you'll see a similar type of authentication or integrity check using a message authentication code and usually it's the two parties communicating that are able to confirm that the other person is who they say they are which is still a very strong form of authentication it's a very strong way to know what really came from the person but only two people know about it if you really want to expand that out so that anybody could check to see that it really came from that person then you would use something like uh like a digital signature where you can publicly verify that the message that was received was really sent originally from the person we think so that is the key is not and that's what we call it non-repudiation the person on the other end who sent this has no way to repudiate or deny that they sent this they could they couldn't have digitally signed it sent it to you and then said no i didn't write that that wasn't me who put that information there well i have your digital signature here and you're the only person in the universe who could have put a digital signature on this from your key so therefore it had to come from you so that's the beauty of non-repudiation we really know that it came from that person we have high confidence in that anybody can check on that the answer there would be non-repudiation answer e now why would it be hashing if you ever done hashing you you maybe take a file you create a hash you send that file to someone else you can check the hash and you've got a pretty good authentication for that file you can see the integrity at least of the file not much authentication but the integrity of the file is there we at least know it was the same file that we started with the problem is the hash itself what if somebody in the middle of the conversation intercepted the conversation put in their own file change the hash and then send it to you well you're still getting the same message just the hashtag does match the file that was sent those are the the challenges with this being able to work through it so hashing doesn't really help us from a knowing who who sent this information which is really the authentication part of it it only helps with the integrity part of that that's only part of what we're looking for certainly not genuine with high confidence integrity is what we were describing with the hash it makes sense that most of you would have done a 50 50 on that that's exactly what happened counterintelligence is when we can recognize that somebody's trying to get information about us and we can of course either mitigate or get information about them back and forth whenever we work through all of those different issues counterintelligence doesn't have anything to do with authentication that is genuine with high confidence and e-discovery is more of a legal term if somebody needs to come in and have a look at your digital logs they will probably go to a judge and say we need to perform discovery or in this particular case e-discovery to be able to gain access to those logs more of a legal issue and it has nothing to do with authentication that is genuine with high confidence the only thing that fits into this the one that does fit best is non-repudiation 44 of you chose that one and that would be the right answer non-repudiation let's do another one i've got another multiple choice here and this one asks which of the following would be the best example of a detective security control would that be ips security policy fence hot site or backup which the following would be the best example of a detective security policy is it ips why do i have security policy in here twice security policy fits and what happened there hot site or backup i guess the security policy that could be a detective security control ips security policy fence hot site and backup that's exactly what it meant to do i just didn't realize it at this very moment in time that's what i meant to do that's what i get for just reading through and not thinking about what i'm doing that is a perfectly reasonable answer to have in here and it could be one of the best examples of a detective security policy we'll know in a moment whether it was or not um let's see if we do this a lot a lot of this you haven't gotten to yet can i go over more section one well we go through each section one at a time so well section one we'll come back around eventually for those are there other methods than a digital signature that would guarantee non-repudiation digital signature is sort of the standard for non-repudiation there's not many other ways that you could beyond a doubt know that message a particular message came from a person the message is unchanged and anybody else in the world would be able to verify it ah digital signature is the way to go there's there's really not a good there's probably a few other ways to do it with a non-repudiation but digital signature certainly the easiest i guess let's say let's say you have someone doing a live stream and they are they have a live stream of the person signing it they have a paper and the live stream can read what the person wrote and then they sign it and then they put that letter they fold up the letter they put a stamp on it and then during the live stream you take the letter all the way to the recipient and then you have them open it up and you have a full and uncut video of the entire process from beginning to end that's non-repudiation and anybody can watch it so yeah there are other ways to do it uh are there other better ways to do it probably not and then of course you'd have everybody complaining wait i didn't i they folded it up they could have changed it while it was folded up they could have they could have done like a mission impossible thing and swapped it well they could have so that's that's one of those situations when you work through which of the following would be the best example of a detective security control let's see how you did with this one would it be ips a security policy offense a hot site or a backup 65 percent of you say an ips would be a good example the best example of a detective security control 19 said a security policy would be we've got nine percent that said a fence we've got two percent that had said hot site we have five percent that said backup well if we go into our control types there's a lot of different control types we need to know for the exam i'm going to bring up the slide i have on the preventive and detective control types there's obviously many other control types that you need to know but the detective control type has a number of interesting characteristics one of which is that it may not actually prevent access just like a detective might be watching from across the street watching everything you're doing this could be technology that watches everything you're doing but doesn't necessarily stop you from doing it there is also a detective may not identify and record perhaps intrusion attempts somebody tries to break in the detective can call you and say i've detected someone trying to break into your network and this could be an alarm and alert a message something that is sent to you that informs you of that happening great way to do it so a good example of a detective mechanism a detective control type is something like a motion detector like the one we have here this motion detector is on looks like the motion detector can wait for somebody to walk into the room and detect that someone is there they're not stopping them from going to the room they're not maybe not even turning on lights or warning anybody of anything they're just detecting that it happened so later on you can look at and of course an intrusion detection system or intrusion prevention system is also a detective control type among other types because these types of mechanisms mechanisms can fit into other categories as well this is not an exclusive thing but it certainly fits with what we were looking for the 66 percent of you that said ips and intrusion prevention system that certainly fits as a detective security control and another type of security control it's on our list is a preventive security control for taking the 501 it's a preventative security control which by the way is exactly the same thing it's like flammable and inflammable it's exactly the same thing the the detective security control at ips is both a detective security control and a preventive security control it can be both you can fit them into different categories so ips certainly fits here as a detective security control a security policy is more of an administrative function so that doesn't detect anything just tells you what you should be doing or not doing on the network does not fit into a detective security control offense more of a physical control being able to stop someone from getting into this that would be a preventive security control there we have a defense right there a door lock security guard a firewall you're physically controlling access for all of those you've got hot sites which are not a security control i guess maybe they're they could be a security control because you could be recovering from a break-in so that recovery process certainly an important security control to consider hot sites will fit there as what a backup so you have at least ways to recover if something happens to the network to your systems to your data but the only one in this list that fits into the detective security control category is an intrusion prevention system 67 percent of you chose that and you got that one absolutely right well done well done with that there's so much to know on this exam isn't there it's just massive and being able to work through all of these and whether you're working on detective security controls preventive security controls corrective security controls you're trying to do any of these different security controls all of those are incredibly important to know and so one of the things is of course i've got all of this in my course my 601 course is 177 videos it is massive uh over 21 hours of content not everyone has time to go through 21 hours of content and take notes from all of this so what i've done is take everything in my course and put it into a set of notes it is my sy0 601 course notes here they are on the screen i'm just going to go through a few pages of some 121 pages of course notes so let's go to uh something that would be good to look at let me pick something from the big list of things since we were looking at all of these how about since we're talking about security controls let's talk about cloud security controls and it goes right to the section of the video that talks about cloud security controls i've got other you can also see some of the charts and some of the diagrams that i have in here from the exam all the command line stuff is in here for the attacks if we go back to the attack types you'll even see the attack types sort of graphically described as being able to have those there lots to lots to view inside of the course notes and they're a great summary if you've read your book you've watched the videos but you need something that summarizes everything in one place it would be my course notes in fact i have the physical version of them right here you can both get digital and physical versions of them the physical one costs a little bit more but if you buy the physical one i send you the the physical in the mail and you get the digital one for free so you can download it immediately and start using it find out more about this at professormesser.com 601cn that stands for 601 course notes or just go to the professor messer website choose the link for the sy-0601 at the top of the page and you'll find those course notes it's a great way to help the site it's a great way also to get some good study materials in return i like to give you something for your money and i think that's a good way to do it have a look at that see if that helps you maybe that can get you through that very big that very massive the biggest security plus exam that they've ever created the sy-0601 have a look at that at professormesser.com601cn let's do another multiple choice question shall we i've got one for those of you familiar with this which of these would best describe a zip bomb which of these would best describe a zip bomb would it be directory traversal a null pointer dereference an api attack a memory leak or resource exhaustion which of these would best describe a zip bomb directory traversal null pointer dereference an api attack a memory leak or resource exhaustion if you think you know the answer please no answers in the chat room you want to go to professormesser.com qa and lock in your answer it's that link right there at the bottom of the page do i have a 601 security plus practice exams web-based version well i have the pdf which of course opens up in many web browsers that's about as close as i will get the security plus all the practice exams the practice exams pdf which is also pdf flavor not quite out yet but working on it we've gotten a lot done on the practice exams just in the last week i'm so pleased with the way that's going so you will see the 601 practice exams i hope in the next month or so i'm going to give myself a little bit more time but i'm hoping over the next month or so we will be able to release those uh my marketing manager lawyer is already doing some editing on the first exam right now so that's how far along we are we're doing very very quickly on getting those practice exams out it's not a web-based version it's a pdf just like my 501 practice exams uh is the way it works that way anybody can use it you don't need to be connected to the internet you don't need a web browser it works on anybody's operating system it works on your mobile devices it works on your laptop it works on your desktop works everywhere the pdf just is much more accessible for everybody so that's one that i think might help to have that there so hopefully that can help you too as you go through your study process and trying to figure out what you're going to do i realize the practice exams there's something we really we really started releasing those just over a year ago they're a relatively new product for us but everybody loves them so we're going as fast as we can and by we i'm the author so i'm going as fast as i can there's nobody else writing these it's just me so that's that's the real key is uh is maybe working through finding the time to make sure i get all of these out as quickly as possible and this all just it just takes time for me to write them but i'm in here at first thing in the morning i'm in here until 10 or so at night writing this just constantly whenever there's something where we're working on a product actively like this it's just an all-day thing for months uh so we're getting through there and figuring it out we will we will make it happen let's see how you did with this one the question asked which of these would best describe a zip bomb would it be directory traversal a null pointer dereference an api attack a memory leak or resource exhaustion well let's see how you did let's show the results click the right button here 53 54 we got a majority say it's resource exhaustion which is how i feel right now 16 percent said it's api attack 14 no i'm fine directory traversal nine percent said null pointer d reference and eight percent said memory leak 54 was pretty strong then that was one of the the biggest ones we saw coming through was the was all of this with the resource exhaustion well first i guess it would help if we knew what a zip bomb was let's get to that in a moment because let's let's kind of break this down for a resource exhaustion perspective as it sort of implies this is a type of denial of service you're taking a particular resource and you're using it all up that's effectively it so you're you're using up all the memory in a machine you're using up all the bandwidth on a network using something and a very common way to do this is with what is called these days a zip bomb this is a file that is 42 kilobytes in size 42 000 bytes this is a very small file it's a very tiny zip file this is this is the tiniest of zip files i have word processing documents most of my word processing documents bigger than the zip bomb very very small this is this 42 kilobyte zip file but when you uncompress it you unzip it it unzips to 4 500 terabytes now i've got a very nice nas in the other room where i have like 50 terabytes on it and that has like years of video that i create this is 4 500 terabytes that is a big big file to uncompress that is effectively 4.5 petabytes we don't even talk in those terms because this is you can imagine sending somebody this in an email easily sent as a zip file and they unzip it it will just simply eat away at all of their available disk space until it fills up that's it they're now they're now completely full their hard drive is completely full trying to uncompress the zip file crashes the operating system won't re just it makes a mess just just horrible now because of that if you have a look at if you get your hands on one of these zip files and i don't recommend you get your hands on one of these it's useless it's it's pointless to have this because you really can't do much with it anyway but an antivirus anti-malware and your system is going to identify it immediately as a zip bomb anyway and it will not let that syst you won't can't download it you can't save it can't run it it won't it won't work so even sending it to somebody it's not even cute anymore it just gets sent that way another good example of resource exhaustion since we're here is a dhcp exhaustion somebody gets on a network changes their mac address does a dhcp request grabs any uh an ip address then changes their mac address does the same thing and changes their mac address and does the same thing until the entire pool of dhcp addresses is gone that's it that's dhcp starvation that's a bad thing when that happens too so resource exhaustion a very specific and very painful denial of service attack and in fact a zip bomb does fit into that category of resource exhaustion the 54 of you got that one absolutely right that would not be an api attack an api attack is is trying to find something and opening with an api that would allow them to perform their own api queries or perhaps even destroy or disrupt the api process an api attack is not part of a zip bomb however directory traversal is when somebody gets on usually a web server and they're able to move backwards outside of the scope of your web server directories by effectively using the dot dot command and moving out of a particular directory in the url that's a very common way to implement directory traversal it is not it has any does not have anything to do with the zip bomb but it is a way that you could somehow get outside the scope of a web server that perhaps is not configured properly and then you have null pointer d references which is a very bad programming issue that you work through but has nothing to do with a zip compressed file and then a memory leak which is annoying certainly denial of service i guess to some degree usually not intentional but the memory elite can certainly be resource exhaustion as well but it doesn't describe zip bomb a zip bomb and memory leak are both types of resource exhaustion whether it's intentional or not it's a different question but memory leak is not what a zip bomb does zip bomb eats up all of your storage space not all of your memory so that doesn't fit there either the only one that fits here would really be resource exhaustion answer e 55 if you got that one absolutely right well done i know we're here close to the top of the hour i think we can fit another question in though and i think we should let's do one more i've got one here that asks which of the following would be the best way to prevent a worm entering the network through a usb flash drive would it be an ngfw a dns sinkhole dlp a sim or a screened subnet which the following would be the best way to prevent a worm entering the network through a usb flash drive would it be in gfw dns sinkhole dlp sim or screened subnet you think you know the answer please no answers in the chat room you want to click our use the link at the bottom professormesser.com qa can't click it you can't click you got to type it in professormesser.comqa and answer your question there lock it in if you're watching this in the replay obviously that professormesser.com qa is not going to help you very much now's a bad time to bring that up here 56 minutes into the live stream uh sorry about that that but you can still follow along with all of this you have to be here live to be able to answer live so it becomes useful to know that have us to have a look through all those answers see if you know what the answer happens to be lock in your answer go to professormesser.com qa lock in that answer how to get a virus i don't know it was we're talking years ago i'm running a mac for so long i don't even think of viruses anymore i know they're i'm waiting for your cards and letters i know they're viruses for max just not many that's that's the difference everybody always likes to say no no there's malware for mac yeah there's like seven pieces of malware for the mac there's more than that but it's relatively speaking my my uh my worries with those types of threats in mac os is remarkably less than somebody who's running windows but put it that way relatively speaking mac os has much less of a concern related to malware than the windows operating system because that's the way it is it's the way it works i i don't make these rules i just go with it so there you go well watching on the news they certainly know if they said three percent of attacks go for mac os and seven percent for linux who are any of us to say that doesn't even make sense does it i don't even know where you get numbers like that where do you even from the department of making stuff up i think it's 90 windows 7 now there's making stuff up they're just i guess somewhere somebody made it up and they are simply saying what someone else made up i get it i understand the process still you don't know what that number is there's no way to get that number there's no way to gather through surveys well that's certainly accurate that's what i'm talking about that is exactly what i'm talking about hopefully that can can help you too with going through all of this literally what i'm talking about let's see how you did with this question that asked which of the following would be the best way to prevent a worm entering the network through a usb flash drive would it be ngfw a dns sinkhole dlp a sim or a screened subnet let's look at our results oh we're all over the place not a majority on this one we have a tie for first between an ngfw and a dlp we also have 21 percent of you that said a sim and then we have effectively a tie for third place between ten percent said screen subnet and nine percent said dns sinkhole so let's talk about usb drives they are a very uh unfortunate security concern if you're looking for a vector that's a very common vector we've heard all the stories of the bad guys just going to the parking lot and throwing usb drives out their window that's an easy way for somebody walking into the building to say oh there's a usb drive on the ground let me plug it into my computer when i get to my desk that's just too easy but it does happen so that's what we think might have happened in 2008 with the us department of defense that got a worm on their network because of a usb drive they plugged in a usb drive and they got uh got infected and so immediately turned off everybody's usb drive banned anybody from ua usb materials everything was turned off now they were able to do that because they had a number of different things they could tell their operating system and tell the other things they were using but they were also using a data loss prevention agent on these devices and they pushed out data loss prevention policies to that that said don't allow anybody to do anything with a usb drive that would be great they lifted the ban finally in february of 2010 and now have strict guidelines on how you may use usb within the department of defense so for a couple years there uh not even just over a year uh very difficult to to be do anything with the usb drive but had to be done because it was very very easy to get into that network by going parking lot throw an usb drive out or whatever you catch him maybe throw it out at the starbucks around the corner that's what i would do you doing starbucks around the corner the watering hole attack along with the usb that's how you would work that i think that's that'd be fantastic be able to block that dlp very very functional it blocks data in many different ways and a dlp agent on somebody's machine or server is a great way to block data would not be the next generation firewall in gfw that's what firewalls are these days if there's a firewall that you have installed somewhere it is most likely what the industry calls a next generation firewall or what the company selling it calls it a next generation fire well not all next generation firewalls are actually next generation firewalls but that's what people call them so that's what what the marketing folks are going with we also have we know that dlp was the right answer in this case 20 of you said a sim that security information and event manager is a a place where you can consolidate log files and create reports and correlate data from many different places on the network but it does nothing to stop somebody from plugging in a usb drive and infecting the network with a worm not very useful there we also have uh 10 of you said a screened subnet those of us that go back in the day that's a dmz so that screened subnet also would not help anybody in fact you go around the screen subnet by bringing in the usb drive into the network just plugging it in so that's that's how that would work and a dns sinkhole is a way that you can configure your dns server to point malicious sites to perhaps a more protected ip address that's on the inside of your network uh dns sinkhole would not also not help a worm entering the network through a usb flash drive the only one of these options that would stop a usb flash drive from working at all is the dlp is having dlp software or an agent on your system and the dlp would have done it 32 percent of you chose dlp that is the right answer that's the one that if you have dlp on your uh suite of security products today then you're probably have some options there for blocking this type of data and you should have all those options there and available in it to be able to work through that maybe that would would help you if you're going through and working through all of those there are some options in windows to do similar things but what if you're not using windows that's the real issue so of course you'd use the dlp software you're running in mac os and linux or whatever operating system we're using including uh ios and android so they're very it it's never one thing is it we always use multiple layers of security to be able to make sure we can prevent things from happening this is one of those layers it's not exclusive and it should not be it should be one of the things that you're using one of the tools in your tool toolkit to be able to make that happen all the questions we went through today come directly from the comptie exam objectives if you're taking the sy-0501 make sure you grab the 501 exam objectives if you're taking the 601 make sure you grab the 601 exam objectives do not cross pollinate those don't use the 501 to study for 601 don't use the 601 to study for 501 that's that's pretty important too you can find these i've got a link to the comptia website where you can download these for free at professormesser.com objectives or you can just go to the google machine type in comptia exam objectives it will take you right to the page it really should be the first thing you download when you start your studies if you're already in the middle of your studies stop what you're doing download these before you go in to take your exam this is your checklist to see how well you have prepared are you ready to take the exam this will tell you these objectives will absolutely point that out to you make sure you're familiar with those make sure you get your hands on those incredibly useful we do one of these study groups every month we've got another one scheduled for june 23rd please come back june 23rd we'd love to have you here these dates can sometimes change and you may note if you were here last week for my network plus study group and i told you next month we've got a study group on the 16th notice we don't anymore we have one on the 15th we moved to back a day so always check in on the calendar for the latest date i update all of these immediately if you have it connected to your google calendar which you can also do from that link i update the google calendar as well you can of course go to professormesser.com calendar and you'll know when the next event is going to be we've got a plus study groups on the 8th and 9th of june network plus on the 15th and security plus on the 23rd great way to come back and participate live we'd love to have you here it's always more fun when you're here we'd love to have you come back and we'll do more questions and answers from security plus can you believe we've gone through an entire hour of q a just like that but that's okay we got more q a coming except in this case you are now going to ask me the questions in the after show stick around for that if you liked what you did in this first hour there is a like button that is on the video screen you're looking at right now click that thumbs up button the likes actually go back to our our friends at youtube i have people that i work with at youtube that are assigned to my account they look at these metrics to see are you worth our time so the only way that i get to know if i'm worth youtube's time is you get to tell them so what a better way to get feedback back to youtube than clicking that like button and subscribing go to professormesser.com youtube don't forget about the daily pop quiz quest or the 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firewall is our super secret code word of the month i in about a week we'll turn these around and get back to you a digitally signed email that has the continuing education unit certification which is me saying in the email i certify that so that's very useful to be able to have that there maybe that will help you as well so now you've got all of the questions we went through we've got all of the things you're able to do after this point and you can earn a ceu who can beat that stick around for the next hour we got plenty more to go through i'm going to open up the phone lines i'll take questions from the chat room thanks for being here and we will see you next time on the security plus study group well let's see if i well that's not the picture i wanted that's the one i wanted right here well not really what i wanted because that's me in the picture there that's a little better that's a little too much of me me with me in the picture is is too much for anyone to ask for so in the meantime now we've got the after show everybody i'm going to take questions from the chat room i'll also open up the phone lines and we'll take questions from people calling in on the telephone voice communication for those of you so for me to do that though i have to do i have to click a few things on my side if you will bear with me just a moment while i click those few things i will make sure that i can start my show up and get those things going i have my skype going here we're going to connect up it's going to make some noises here in just a moment hopefully that's always the concern you never know is it going to pick up is it not going to pick up is there a show today is there not a show today we never know we're going to see what the nice lady says though enter your six-digit pin all right i will do that and if i do all of that correctly she says welcome professor messer thanks nice lady that means you are able to communicate well not with that not with that graphic because i haven't updated my graphics yet on the screen i have more things to click on on this side than you may may not even realize we'll have also phone lines are open along with the chat room i'm watching both as we go by and we'll take those questions there were a few that came up earlier if you would like to call in it's a toll-free number in the continental united states 855-785-rj45 you can also call in of west of the rockies 855-785-7545 we'll get you the same place so that might help you as well you can also if you are working through this or you're watching from outside of the continental united states you can use skype to call me for free because this is a toll-free number and you can call anywhere on skype that is a toll-free number for free i pay for the message i pay for the call you put a plus one at the beginning plus one eight five 855-785-7545 and that would get you there as well this is a great way to call in you can of course ask questions there was a question earlier in the chat room that talked about digital editions and physical editions here's a physical edition of my course notes the physical edition is a physical book the digital edition is a pdf it contains exactly the same information and the question uh was relating to that which said uh if you have the digital version of the book can you get the physical version i think the person actually said can you get the physical version for free well you can't get it for free because dead trees cost money as it turns out and it's printed in color it's not inexpensive to create these physical versions that's why if you look at the pricing between the two notice the physical version a wee bit more expensive so but i will give you credit for purchasing the digital version that you can then apply to upgrading so you can get a discount off the physical version you don't have to spend uh that money twice just spend it one time i guess is the way it works but you're still gonna end up spending the money unfortunately to have that there uh maybe that will help you as well so i think that can that can help you along the way uh if you're trying to figure out what should you work on to be able to work through this can you call from india you can call from anywhere in the world that's a toll-free number but it works on skype anywhere in the world just put that plus one at the beginning just like it says plus one eight five five seven eight five seven five four five so hopefully that will help you let's go the phone lines uh it's a florida connection the 407 central florida area code hello caller which name are you calling from hey professor mesa this is my name is michael and i'm relatively new um i was reading some of the recommendations with comptia they were mentioning perhaps to a network plus security and then security plus um and then let's say if you want to be a traditional then go into penetration after that would you say that's a good course of action or could you just you know skip over network funds and go right to security plus it's it's not a bad course of action one of the things that uh it's hard to say is that it could go either way we could have uh different paths to be able to get from one side of the industry to the other i started help desk i moved into networking really what moved into servers then to networking then to security now if you were able to find a security position that is able to give you a job without having any other experience then that makes sense you could just start with security there's not a lot of jobs out there for that though a lot of the jobs dealing with security are are very much expecting you to have some existing uh knowledge of how this this whole system is going to work out so i think if you're working towards security having knowledge of networking having knowledge of operating systems having knowledge of servers is only going to help you but there are a few jobs out there i've spoken earl in other study groups about a security operations center and a sock is one of those examples of a technology that or a job that might start you in security without having any other type of experience so it's really what the employers in your area are looking for see if you can find what the employers may be looking for in your area that might help you a little bit as well um it may be useful to spend at least uh 15 30 minutes going through the jobs in your area see what they're asking for is everybody asking for security plus are they asking for network plus might help you in deciding what direction you go okay but ultimately if you want to be a penetration tester then um you're saying that would be the right path or you're saying to do eight plus and then and then move past eight plus towards the pin testing is kind of the upper level echelons uh in the i.t security world and if you're working as a penetration tester you still need to have a good pack probably more than a good foundation in all of those things you need to be an expert in networking you really need to understand operating systems you need to have a good understanding of windows mac os linux and mobile devices um and there are other higher level certifications you might want to work towards if you're planning a career in penetration testing but that's not a role you would sort of jump into as your first job in in security you work up to that role eventually especially since there's so few penetration testing jobs out there relative to all of the others in it security thanks a lot thank you i appreciate the call uh thanks so much so i'm i'm looking at uh the messages people are sending in the chat room saying there wasn't any connectivity in fact i'm getting uh all alternating stories from my youtube front end on my stream health that tells me that there's no stream available on this but i haven't stopped the stream the stream is exactly the way i left it so i'm going to go back into my live side it shows me live we'll go back to the control and probably just refresh you turn everything off and you turn it back on again and we'll see if anything works i'm looking at it right now and my stream health shows me the stream is healthy although as people mentioned uh youtube did seem to have a little bit of a glitch a few minutes ago sorry about that but i don't have control of youtube's challenges with these things so hopefully that little glitch was just minor we'll have to look at it afterwards i don't like to uh i don't like to go through and um and work through the the challenges with uh editing and reposting the the pieces of this so that's one of those where hopefully it won't be a problem for you either let me pop open the chat room i'm now going to reconstruct everything on my screen which normally i have to do to be able to get that so we'll done that and we're back up and i think we're in good shape so i froze for a few seconds which is probably just enough it didn't feel that cool here but i guess i did freeze for a little bit rob in the chat room thank you for the 19.99 super chat donation we appreciate that uh the question you have in here it's a great way to get your question right to the top of the queue by the way uh why why do most it jobs require an a-plus certification then network plus so in this case rob passed your network plus exam but all the jobs seem to ask for a plus and that tends to be pretty standard in the industry it's one of those situations where you have to know the market we're just speaking to the last caller about this is that knowing the market is probably one of the most important parts of the job process what are people asking for if you are in the dc area a lot of the i.t jobs there practically require a security plus if you go to dallas and you look at the it jobs there not quite the same emphasis probably very different emphasis in certifications that people are looking for may not be the same number of people asking for this a lot of entry-level jobs in it are looking for a plus because it's a very broad certification it covers operating systems it does a lot of people i think dismiss and this is donna's even mentioning in the chat room is that my mentor said the a plus isn't the best anymore and took it off the table i don't think your mentor gets to decide that nor do i nor do you i think what you have to be able to do is go to the listing of jobs in your area and what are people asking for that is the true determination of value if an employer is hiring you because you have an a plus guess what the a plus is like the most important certification in the world if that's what they're hiring for if an employer is looking for network plus turns out network plus is the most important certification in the world if the employers are looking for security plus you see where this is going so that's the real thing to know is that it's not up to me to determine what the best certifications are for a particular job it's not up to you it's not up to any third party it's up to the employers and uh in the video that i did of how to get a job in it with no experience which i think i stuck already in the ex in this video description if it's not lori will put it in the video description of how to get a job at it with no experience it's on my youtube channel i talk about how you know which certifications to get and which certifications are valuable and that's effectively the shorter version of what i put in the video which is find out what people are asking for go get what they're asking for period is network plus a higher level certification it's certainly considered a high level certification it's security plus higher level it is ccna even higher level than that it's not that's not even an entry level search ccna would be more of an intermediate level cert or just higher than entry level so ccna why wouldn't you just go get a ccna because if an employer sees you have no experience and you walk in the door with a ccna you're overqualified immediately overqualification is a real thing people do not want to hire you if they think you're going to be bored doing this job and if you have no experience in i.t you need to have the requisite certifications for somebody that doesn't have any experience and in your particular area that might be a plus it probably is a plus so that's where i always tell people you have to redirect that question redirect it from where you are from a i.t perspective and what you want to do i want to get into security i want to do cisco networking i want to do the other types of networking well you don't want to do this then you want to instead it's not it's not about you as much as you would like it to be yeah it's not about you this is just one of the many times in my life i've been told it's not about me um and so you need to find out it's about the employer what are they looking for and if all the employers are looking for a plus turns out that's the best certification ever that's the one you should be getting so that's that's the real key is is working your way up and you will work into networking you will work into security you will get there there is a path for that there's tons of jobs there's plenty of ways to get through the processes and get to that point but you need some background experience and a plus is a great one to get experience in the raw hardware get experience in operating systems get experience in troubleshooting windows troubleshooting printers the church you're gonna be doing a lot and then finally move up from there once you start working there and you start working on the network you work with the network team and you help them build out a network and you help them run cables and you work on helping them crimp things you get to know the people in that department they'll bring you over but they want you in that position they want to see how your people skills are they want to see how your troubleshooting skills are they want to see all of these things about how you work with technology turns out the help desk is exactly what shows those things so i think that's that's a good example are the mta certs worth it it's the same answer it's exactly the same answer as as is an a plus worth it is the network plus worth it is security plus worth it are the mta search worth it our employers is your let's back up is your goal to get a job if so what do employers want you to have that's the answer now i realize that's a very myopic perspective it's a very single gold perspective there's of course things around that you want to be better with technology you want to learn more for yourself you want to be able to build your knowledge base for jobs that you might get in the future absolutely absolutely you do but for most of us we're getting these certifications to get that job and if that's the case we need to correlate and put them directly together with each other and figure out what makes the most sense so if everybody in your area wanted you to get a a third party uh let's say they want to get you a juniper certification like every entry-level job in your area says you have to get a juniper cert very unusual but guess what certification you're going to go get go get a juniper cert because that's what they want so that's the real key now there's other things you need to do to be able to get that job in that video i talk about knowing people who work there getting a experience setting up your home lab understanding what type of formal education you might want to put on along with the lines on all of that so that's that's the real key so whenever i get these questions so already in here people said what about a plus what about mta what about azure so azure just came up would that be a good one to have i don't know what does the employer want you to have so i know that's sort of a it's sort of a cop-out answer it's sort of a bad answer like i don't know if that's good for you what do you want to do and what are employers looking for that's the answer so i kind of have to turn the whole table around and point the mirror the other direction for a little bit because you do need to do some research create a spreadsheet go out to your favorite online job posting site go through every job that you think applies to your particular goals and objectives what you want to do and you think fits what your qualifications are and figure out what they're looking for and create an entire spreadsheet find 10 jobs in your area create a spreadsheet with all 10 of these jobs are there correlations there are there certifications they're all asking for are there some people asking for different certifications than the other what are they asking for that's what you need to do and that's the only answer i can give you because i'm not hiring you someone else is so they're going to be able to answer the question you effectively have to answer answer the question from them uh let's go back to the phones we've got a uh return caller it's dave hi dave thanks for calling what can we do for you thank you question message i appreciate everything you're doing for us guys trying to get the um security plus but i have a question that my friend she has experienced a anonymous phone call she was at the store she left her dog outside in the car and some some guy had came by in the car and saw that and called her and she asked him for his name how did he get her phone number and he didn't say um and then eventually he drove off but she did a reverse search on his number and found out who he was on facebook is there a way that somebody can just drive by and get your say like your tag number and she didn't have any magnetic signs on the car and get your phone number to call you um you know if they think that the dog is in distress or something or is that something you just have to call the police about well it was this is one of these situations of as well that is um you don't know where they got the data from but in many states the information is maybe more generally available than in other states it's a very state in the united states every state has their own policy on how they handle license tag information because it seems like that's that would be the most common way we can think of in our minds that someone would have gotten your contact info although with my i'm trying to think would mike i think i did register my car tags with my mobile number too so you could actually get a mobile number um and and but we also don't want to discount that the person who called although now you know a little bit more about the person who called they could work for an organization that has access to the credit card or to the license tag database so that might be or they might know somebody or have a family member who is in the police and they have access so you see this can there's many ways to gain access to information especially open source intelligence oh sent they did their own ocean uh without having maybe they did have a computer in front of them maybe they just called around though to gather those details that's not beyond the realm of possibility we often don't think about our license tag numbers the address is where we live the thing you know those are things that are very public um in many states the the house where you live is all public when it was purchased when it's sold the things you own there's a lot of ways to gather that open source intelligence and so i wouldn't i wouldn't get freaked out about it um it's kind of annoying that somebody's trying to call you out that your dog's in the car and they're complaining about it and that's another part of it that probably is emotional and uh and gets people in an argumentative state and of course we don't know what happened with the conversation that took place but i i like to think that someone is doing that because they're looking out for the best uh for the pooch and you can thank them for calling you and that we're all taken care of and they have everything they need and the dog is not going to be a problem and i do know the dog is there and thank you so much for calling goodbye and go with it but you can't stop those things if somebody wants to get your mobile number there's a number of places i can think of that people could go to right now and probably get my mobile number please don't please don't call me on my mobile normal number but that's one of those cases where uh we don't know how they got it but is it so hard to get your mobile number these days not really uh should you be kind of it's kind of freaky kind of creepy that someone would do that they got my phone number uh that's true yeah that's that's probably the the icky part of this is just somebody at some time finding you hunting you down and calling you uh but we can hope in this particular case they were doing it for all the right reasons and not for something that would be considered harassment and we just go with it that way so i wouldn't worry about it too much you just keep it moving block their number and keep it moving that's that's what you do right okay i appreciate that info hopefully that that's not going to help happen to any of us i just find that it's a little off-putting though if that happened to me i'd be a little creeped out by it uh even though i know all the things i know how they would have gone about getting my number i know that they can call it any time i know all of that happens still creeps you out a little bit doesn't it um so it does it uh just makes you think about your own personal safety and the things you need to do to maintain the safety of you and your family and and all of your property but that's uh uh certainly another important consideration when we talk about security is physical security and maybe that fits into this as well all right thanks a lot doctor i appreciate the call dave have a good one you too it's it's sort of off-putting when those types of things happen and we're seeing more and more of it and of course i think we're becoming a little more also concerned about who's really calling us are you really outside did you really see my dog did this really happen if just a random person calls me i'm looking at your dog right are you really really but they actually might be in this particular case they probably were i wouldn't believe someone if they called me oh yeah really okay thanks i'd probably hang up on them uh the real answer though is i would have never answered the phone i'm that person like i don't recognize that number if it's that important they'll leave a voicemail that's that's that's who i am because i never talk on the phone very rarely am i expecting a call very rarely is it that particular situation and if i am expecting a call i've usually programmed them into my phone so that i know when they're calling or what i've tried to do with everybody i work with is i just trained everyone to text message and that makes it so much easier the only problem you run into is doctors offices where apparently the only way they can communicate with you is by pulling out an ibm selectric typewriter typing a letter putting that into an envelope licking a stamp and sending it to you they just don't know how to do anything else uh i had a doctor once text me with messages i thought i can't believe we're finally at that point where we can text me now text messaging changes the world but now we have to worry about text messaging spam and all the things associated with that we just talked about that and having that there question chat room how many pages are my sy0 601 security plus course notes if i look at the last page of information 120 pages of this all the way the back that's 120 pages of notes i don't start counting until the first page of notes so that first page is page one even though it's like six seven pages into it um 120 pages plenty to have there um i'm seeing the same sort of laggy poor response from youtube the chat room is saying that's just uh nature of the beast today it seems now it tells me i have an excellent connection so we're gonna hope for the best that's a kind of a it's either a local provider problem today or it's a youtube problem today it happens from time to time but it doesn't seem to be debilitating in any case so we're going to keep it moving and see what we can do with those maybe maybe we can work through any of those problems but we'll go back to the phones anyway to the 309 area code hi caller what's your name where you calling from call or caller hi my name is jill hi jill hi and i'm from illinois and um i was just wondering i'm taking the exam on friday for security plus okay and i'm trying to fit in as much last-minute stunting as i can in these next few days and i was wondering if you had any tips on what you think are like the most difficult parts to pass or to work on i guess for that which exam are you taking the 501 or the 601 the 601 okay so you've got there's a few things that are a little bit different when the 601 versus the 501 so we'll start of course with the objectives themselves are broadly different so for those of you that are taking the 501 jill did not have to memorize any of the detailed symmetric encryption protocols asymmetric encryption protocols hashing algorithms none none of those ciphers had to be memorized because they're not on the 601 exam so you kind of got a break along those lines i also found looking through the question style on the 601 that it was very straightforward if you go back and look at 501 exam questions my exam questions book for 501 which i don't recommend you do but for those of you that have looked at that before you'll know on the 501 exam and i've even said this before it's almost in a comprehension a reading comprehension exam as much as it is security because the questions are four and five sentences long with multiple bullets all to answer one single multiple choice question what i found with the 601 is the questions are so much more straightforward they are one in two sentences for the majority of questions you get on the exam sometimes you get a three sentence question um and some there are questions there that are longer with multiple bullets on the 601 but they're very few and far between so i think the questions on the 601 are better in their style of question and answer i think you'll be able to get through the exam a lot faster but it is a broad exam there are many many more topics there are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of additional topics on the 601 exam that you don't see on the 501. since you're planning to take this exam so quickly the only thing i can really recommend you do is go to the exam objectives and just start checking off uh objective by objective by objective and going through each one of those and if you can explain to yourself or to someone else what that particular objective means then you can check that one off your list and go the next one so this might be a good way to maybe circle very large groups of information that maybe you weren't able to go through so well the first time through or find little details that are hidden within these domains that maybe you could brush up on before walking into the exam because what i have found in the questions they ask on 601 is they cover everything on that exam they could cover everything on that exam they don't tend to leave out much at all on the exam questions they take a little sampling from everything uh so you won't be able to people often ask is there a section i should study more than another nope they are equally as painful across all domains you are not going to be in a situation where one particular type of technology is asked more than another except at the domain level now you'll notice on the exam objectives i don't even think i have the objectives up right now i don't but you'll notice on the exam objectives that the different domains have a different percentage asked on the exam and we can assume from that that certain topics might appear more than others so that's another thing you might want to consider is more from a broad perspective is is there a certain domain that they ask more than another and have i studied more for that domain than the others because it's a relative term relative relative to the other domains have you really put in the time make sure you you kind of examine that and honestly tell yourself have i studied for the amount that i would expect to receive on my exam for that particular domain and if you have it now's the time to go through and start going through the checklist i think that's really the best thing you can do when you're short of time and you've got like an hour left an hour or say a week left and going through this you need to study where do i spend my hours studying for that week of time that's what you would do is go through that and use it as a checklist um have you had a chance to do that yet or have your is this sort of the beginning of that last phase for you no i've not quite done that yet i was looking at the objectives this morning but i haven't really like gone through that process so that's a great last the last phase last push last set of of studies is that's the way to do it because that'll bring up the areas that you perhaps haven't gotten down cold yet and of course those are the ones they're going to ask you on the exam or the things you don't know so so that's that's my recommendation use your exam objectives they are incredibly valuable they're free you can download them right now start checking off the list either print them out or annotate them online they're just a pdf file you can uh go through every single one of those it will take you all day just to go through that entire list so now's the time to start okay thank you so much for your help and i really appreciate your your videos and the resources you give thanks jill i appreciate the call best of luck this is always a challenge you're getting into that last section of study and the real question most people have is when do i go in and take this exam am i ready to go in and take this exam because if you if you've never gotten to this point of taking a certification exam or you're just not comfortable knowing when the right time is comptia and their exam objectives are very unique in the industry you will not find this from microsoft you will not find it from cisco you will not find it from apple you will not find it from amazon um they are the only ones for the most part uh that will tell you bullet by bullet exactly what you need to know for the exam they tell you everything it's it's a comprehensive list it's pages and pages and pages i'm talking about it here and i just don't even have it up on the screen i should probably work along those lines i'm talking about it so much but not showing it to you and i have the exam objectives right here somewhere it's for the 501 let me pull up the objectives for the 601 i think i have the version 3 objectives for those of you watching here are the exam objectives so there they are for the 601 exam we'll open it up on the domain side you can see the breakdown so for example uh the domain 3.0 implementation is 25 the exam so a quarter of the exam same thing for domain one and tax threats and vulnerabilities 24 half your exam is domains one and three so have you spent half your time studying from domains one and three if you look at domain five governance risk and compliance which i had to i fell asleep multiple times making these videos risk risk videos are the best aren't they for only 14 of the exam though so relative to implementation you should get fewer questions about governance risk and compliance on your exam so that's what i mean by figuring out which side of these you should go with but let's look at an actual exam objective so for instance just start section one compare and contrast different types of social engineering techniques and you need to know fishing smishing vision spam spam over internet messaging or spim spear fishing dumpster diving shoulder surfing farming tailgating eliciting information whaling prepending identity fraud invoice scams residential harvesting reconnaissance hoax impersonation and many more it just goes on and on and on the reason i kind of stepped through all of those and just kept telling you on all the bullet bible we're only halfway through section 1.1 at this point that's how detailed the exam objectives are they tell you everything you need to know so if you are studying for your exam and you know everything that's in this list you're good you don't you don't need to study anymore you got it that is exactly what you will be asked for on the exam a real challenge uh to have that there the 601 exam is one third larger by number of objectives than the 501. so if it takes you three months to study for the 501 exam it's another month to study for the 601 so if you want to talk about difficulty level i think that goes into the realm of having to memorize or remember more information that certainly makes it more difficult by by a large margin that makes it much more difficult i would not say the 601 is an easier exam than the 501 it is clearly more difficult to get through um once you know everything i think the the way they ask the questions on the exam is very comparable i think the exam itself from a difficulty level the exams are similar in their difficulty by the way they ask the questions but the amount of information you have to memorize for the 601 is so much larger that uh just makes a harder exam that's the reason i always recommend getting your 501 because you'll save so much money due or in time uh effort in doing that uh important consideration let's go back the phone lines to the 856 area code hi caller what's your name where you calling from caller caller yeah hi professor this is hello hi hello what's your name where you calling from am i audible you are okay thank you so this is amok calling from india first of all i would like to thank you for all the continuing um videos that you produce every month on the security study groups i already have a security plus certification yeah edited back in 2019 and i am now looking forward towards moving into the cloud security uh although i don't have enough practical experience in the cloud domain uh so what would you recommend because i am currently studying for ccsp isc square ccsp exam although i do plan to take it maybe in you know in in 12 months time from now okay so what would you recommend before attempting that ccsp something uh like cloud plus to get a more practical experience and and then attempt ccsp i i like the idea of getting more cloud certifications i think that the industry and what employers are looking for they are asking for more knowledge in cloud technologies i think there's a lot of open positions and the people in those positions need more help and there's just not enough knowledge of cloud the cloud is happening and moving so fast that being very knowledgeable in cloud technologies is a very powerful set of skills today so i think you're absolutely right for pursuing some type of certification and knowledge on the cloud computing side along those lines there's a lot of options out there for cloud computing certifications the ones that are probably mentioned the most when i look at job postings are the job postings uh the certifications from microsoft their azure certifications are brought up quite a bit so that's a good example of some certifications that would be good to look into and the other ones are the amazon certifications probably because there are so many people using azure and there's so many people using amazon that they want people who are knowledgeable with those front ends those technologies to be able to work with them so if i had to choose one of those i would probably go see what employers are looking for but either one of those is a good bet and once you understand how azure works you kind of understand how the cloud works broadly and you can apply that to other cloud providers as well microsoft has just sort of jumped on board and has taken hold of the industry with the cloud so because of that i often tell people why not add in everybody knows microsoft certifications they trust microsoft certifications and microsoft has had a big push into cloud certifications now's the time to take advantage of that that's what i would recommend to you as well but it should also be tempered with what employers are looking for and if employers rather you have an amazon cert then go get the amazon either way you're a winner you cannot lose with that one all right no problem thank you professor i mean maybe yeah maybe in the one year down the line uh once i have some sort of practical knowledge in terms of uh managing the cloud services uh while attempting the certification that you just mentioned the ground level certification rather on the cloud technologies then i can definitely attempt the ccsp i think that's a that's a good plan that's a good path you're kind of working the knowledge you have and working your way up those uh those different levels that's a great way to level up and i think it's a good strategy okay thank you i appreciate the call and always a good idea everyone should be thinking about their strategy you should already have in your mind all right i want to work here for two years i want to learn as much as i can about the network then i want to go maybe work for the network team that we have here or work for a network team and then i want to move up into security i want to do it security i want to want to learn about sims i want to learn about vpns you should already have this path in your mind is that path going to be exactly the path you follow nope it's not because the world is uh unpredictable and often you may find that a new technology falls in your lap you weren't expecting and now you're suddenly the expert in that new technology that sometimes happens too either way you're in pretty good shape you're in you're now studying you're continuing the path you're moving up you have a plan the worst thing you can do is to look where you are and go i'm happy here there's nothing else i want to do than work in this job probably not the actually that's that's a very healthy thing to think about that's the way i think in the position i'm in now i don't plan on going anywhere i like what i'm doing but if you're planning to move up if you have an idea other things you would like to do in the industry and you want to do those you want to either learn more you want to make more money you want to have more options for your jobs you want more options for what you do and where you work then there will need to be a path so already put the path there if you don't build the path you're never going to get down that road you need to already have in your mind this is the way you're going to go with this it already changes the way you act it changes the way you work it changes the things you learn and how you learn them so you should already have that path in place i think it's a positive reinforcement in your mind and then use that path to work yourself towards that end goal another important part of that back the phone lines let's go to uh the 240 area codes oliver thank you for calling again uh thank you for holding uh hey how you doing appreciate the call what can we do for you uh yeah so uh i just passed my core one a plus exam back in february and right now i'm studying for my course two great uh i just like the first thank you for your videos and your course notes um definitely a big help more than happy to help with those glad they were uh they were able to help a little bit so are you working on core two now yeah i'm currently studying for my court too um i plan to take it probably a month or two from now i'm just going through some q a i did i did buy your practice exams too thank you um so like i got two questions here my first question is that uh so i got an internship this summer for a company that mainly specializes in like law enforcement technology okay so like radios cameras bluetooth wireless radio frequency and it's not really what i expected at first for some reason but at the same time it's very interesting i like it so far and my ultimate goal was to like work in cloud or security and so and another thing that i get to do is work with servers so how can i make the most out of this job even though it wasn't my first you know interest you know because this is definitely out of my you know expectation well this is that's a very unique niche of technology which is law enforcement especially the mobility associated with law enforcement and i've done a little bit of work with people who do that and and have some conversations and listen to presentations for people that are working through that and it is a science unto itself we don't talk a lot about these mobile technologies and the way that law enforcement uses them a lot in the a plus or network plus mostly because it's so unique you don't see that type of networking or that type of technology used outside the scope of law enforcement because of the unique requirements that law enforcement would have with this but it is something that's pervasive you know every car and every person and now they've been expanding it further into all everyone's cameras it's it's growing the need for a particular knowledge in that niche is certainly a large one and from there is a jumping off point to other technologies once you understand the nuances of the forum 5g technologies that you're using to connect all of the cars you're using uh different technologies in the existing radio communications that for voice that are there uh there's so much technology uh that's built into that that you can then apply other places and it may be that you're applying it to 802.11 networks on a campus or you're applying it to other uh maybe a transportation company that needs a similar type of communication you can still use that knowledge in other roles wherever you happen to go so that's what i would recommend that you learn as much as you can about that is it pure ip networking with cisco switches and routers not necessarily although there's certainly a path to that so i think that's where i would recommend you that's a great job there's plenty to learn there are technologies there that you will be able to apply to whatever you do in the future so it's a great position it's a great thing to have your hands on is it uh you mentioned maybe not the thing that you were thinking the most about what you wanted to do but there's always time to do that maybe that's the next step or the step after that but having this level of knowledge was something that's very key it's very specific it's very i use the term niche a lot here but it really is very niche speaks to other employers that you're able to work through those types of technologies it's a very complex set of technologies it's not easy um there's tons of challenges there's things you're going to have to be able to work through and engineer around that's the type of of of experience that people want you to have when you move to the next job even if your next job happens to have no rf in it at all there's just no wireless communication at all in your next position but you'll still have the skills that you learn putting this one in to be able to apply to that so it you uh the the technologies i learned when i started my career back when uh we did everything with uh chisels and stone um that technology i learned back then i can't use today it was ibm mainframes and middleware and a lot of coax and emulation programs but the things that i did with troubleshooting with managing the network with optimizing protocols with setting up a infrastructure that was up all the time i had fault tolerance built in i had high availability those same skills i use today so there's no difference what i did 20 years ago 30 years ago versus what i do now you'll be able to use those skills wherever you go so don't worry that you're somehow learning something that will shoehorn you or or put you in a corner no no this is expanding your capabilities and giving you potential and options for the future right and actually this is like my first technical job and so i mean who knows maybe my goals might change and maybe i might want to work in this field uh honestly it depends so i'm like i'm really just trying to keep like an open mind about it and just trying to learn as much as i can some of the the most interesting things i've worked on um with technology through the years have been related to law enforcement interestingly enough did some upgrades to systems in a dna lab worked with customers uh putting in systems that were in a um a jail a facility there were other times i was working with designing networks for connectivity for the law enforcement for the police stations you know those things you will be able to use and apply wherever you go so uh learn as much as you can soak it all in and uh be able to use some of this knowledge and technology on the next step you're right there will be an another job maybe it will be within law enforcement maybe you'll move to transportation maybe you'll move to financial services maybe you'll do something with manufacturing maybe you'll be in health care you know all of those things a piece of all of those things you'll be able to take what you've learned and use it in all of those so i think that's that's what you should do too is learn as much as you can and from there you can use that technology um and move up and around to whatever you want to do in the industry the only the only real thing we have that gives us leverage when we're looking for jobs is our knowledge so learn as much as you can and then you'll be able to use that knowledge next job wherever that happens to be yeah i totally agree um so my second question is uh i'm currently enrolled at a school that's similar to wgu so just a little background every class for me is about eight weeks and all my it classes are basically the materials for like industry certification so they have their own class that teaches like a plus network plus all the content even linux and cloud plus even as far as the ceh and the ccna so i know eight weeks that's pretty uh that's a pretty condensed time uh so my future plan was to like as i'm taking the class for the eight weeks that i supplement it with for example your videos or a q a or even a class on udemy and so i just want to i just want your opinion like is it realistic to get all this material while also trying to balance the accelerated you know eight weeks like what is your like opinion on that i i think your your perspective of this is pretty accurate eight weeks is very aggressive for many of these certifications i often tell people that getting a security plus on average tends to be about three months if you really work through very uh aggressively and go through it you can shorten that time frame if you have other experience in the industry you can shorten that time frame so eight weeks of a focused class that is going through this these topics isn't necessarily a horrible number it's certainly much better than the one or two weeks that you would see with these horrible boot camps that you would have there eight weeks is a pretty good number but i think you're right that even then you're you're getting a lot of different types of information that you're learning very very quickly the best you're going to do is just kind of keep up you're going to be hit with a lot of information very quickly you'd you'd be doing well to grab other resources and be able to read through some of this content just to get through these because i'm assuming they're going to have you take the certification exam at the end of these things that's probably how they would they would really set you up for success and if you want to be ready for that you're going to need to supplement this try to use as many different resources as you can get videos get books get q a get some hands on use as much of that classroom resources as you can they probably have practically all of those available for you to use as part of the class itself take advantage of those it's the only way you're going to be able to get through that much material that quickly yeah i agree and like an additional benefit is that i believe they do pay for around 60 of the exam so i'm definitely trying to take that you know advantage i do also plan to like study even before the class starts and probably extend it after the class starts because you know i'm trying to use those tools to help me get those certifications you know you know at the same time while getting these college classes done so i definitely think it's going to be a challenge but i think uh you know just as long as i supplement it with the proper material i think i might be all right there are so many people that come to my site and they're just trying to get this one certification done they have limited resources available to them they're still not quite sure how they're going to end up paying for the certification exam itself there's all these challenges with just getting the one cert now in your particular case you're you're relatively fortunate it's a very structured environment you've got other people in the class and instructors that you could lean on along with third-party resources a lot of the the costs associated with the certification um are at least somewhat covered uh it's a great opportunity it's kind of what i'm saying is don't don't mess this one up you've got a good thing going here uh take advantage of as much of this as you possibly can and no no nobody's hiring somebody that has all eight of these search in their pocket but having one or two of those search in your pocket and showing that to a prospective employer is incredibly valuable along with everything else that you're learning anyway through the process it's a great opportunity make sure you take advantage of it awesome i appreciate you know all the work you put in and i believe that's all the questions i have but i'll definitely keep you updated please what happens with the job and the certifications absolutely we'd love to hear uh how that goes and how the process is not only with the classes that you're taking but uh also with the job it's uh always interesting to see the path that other people take we appreciate the call yeah no problem you have a good one this is why i think we we sometimes forget that there is no direct honor rail process in i.t um and caller i see you've been holding for a while we'll get to you in just a moment but i want to before i forget this is that the the way that you move up or around in it is really based on what you want to be able to do you're the one looking for the jobs you're the one going after these positions wherever they happen to be and there's many different ways to get to the job that you want to have sometimes these paths go a different way than even what you were expecting and that's the part that i think we don't often think about is sometimes it's a surprise the job that i had just prior to doing this full-time i worked as a systems engineer for palo alto networks and it's a job that someone called me that i knew uh that i've worked with in the past and said hey i'm gonna go work here uh you should check this out they have some openings and you would be perfect for this like man in fact i told them initially i don't know i don't know if i really want to do that um and the more i talk to them they're like oh okay they're pretty excited about this let me go see what they're doing and that eventually turned into my next job and what i went to work for and worked there seven years through as they were startup and worked all the way through them going public and growing and it was it was an amazing experience and i would not have ever thought that was the path but as it turns out it was a perfectly logical path based on the things that i've done in the past so don't sometimes we overthink these things don't overthink it just focus on what you know and where you want to go and everything else is going to work itself out trust me this industry is big and there's a lot of options available for you out there just go grab one of them try it out see how that works for you uh absolutely consider so uh let's go back to the phones the 908 area code hi caller which name are we calling from am i on [Music] because uh with how i passed my uh a plus exam i've gone certified now great and uh i was just thank you for the question that you give that you gave for the co-worker because uh while i was doing the basically working as a global course but basically this company they i just paid about 500 pounds and they gave me like a whole whole thing basically and they gave me like that gave me access to live labs and i like any questions i could do so while i was doing them i liked i didn't do that a hundred times over and over again and then to the point where i have to look at that look after the question right there and i did your question they were different and i would start getting wrong the instagram questions as well because it's just like a quick easy way for me to er and i won't go back so then starting your questions i was like this is amazing and then i went into the exam now the first time i want to fail first time i got 6 15 and uh when i was reading the questions they were that's different that makes the answers change like you can see you completely tell those in the every question like chances are like two in a plus 220 dash 1001 questions enough questions because i just want to do some more i just want a few more questions and i just uh randomly came on these websites and i was going to use it because the question that they came on the internet search for the one that i did like the exact same one the wording is the same and i was just like because if these are the questions and the answers are already there it is a bit of an ethical dilemma uh certainly and this is what other people may have seen out on the internets um and and figuring out the details of this but for those of you listening and i i realize it was a a difficult um connection there for people to understand what's going on but effectively the caller has gone through the process of taking the a plus certification but then found places on the internet that appeared to have questions that were similar if not exact to what they found on the actual exam and this is what we call the industry uh a brain dump i know that's not exactly what some people define as a brain dump but it's commonly how it is uh advertised on the internet and it is cases where people have in some way obtained actual exam questions and they are making them available to others on the internet um and to your to your question that something's not quite right about that does comptia know about it or not is an obvious question because uh it is copyrighted material and it is unethical to have access to the questions that the actual exam questions before you take the exam comptia does not allow this they don't want that it is not something that is acceptable and they even tell you as part of the exam objectives and as part of the candidate agreement you signed prior to taking the exam that if you disseminate this information or if you have used this information and they statistically have identified you as someone who did already know this information prior to walking and taking the exam that they can revoke your certification they pretty much spelled out that way in the candidate agreement so i would be very careful when you are looking at questions and answers on the internet that you are not using actual exam materials that are coming from someone who has posted these in an effort to disseminate the actual exam questions other people for some reason will try to justify in their minds the purposes of using these no this is preparing me for the exam no this is getting me familiar with the way they ask the questions it's not it's cheating it's cheating plain and simple this one there's there's no black and white there's no little gray area in the middle it is cheating there's no question about that uh it is unethical it and certainly if you're taking a security plus exam using actual exam materials to cheat prior to going into the exam is questionable at best plus you don't learn anything um you don't learn a thing by going through that process you're simply checking off and in fact what i have found because i have run into these on the internet as well when people bring them to my attention and i'll look at them the answers they often put as what they say the correct answer is actually is not correct i think this is probably how comptia determines that you have used one of these sources that they know what the wrong answers are and they find that you're putting the same wrong wrong answers as some of these brain dump sites so my recommendation to you is don't use those sites there's no single place you can go to find these but it's once you start really looking at the questions it becomes relatively obvious that that's the case now for my practice exams um this is probably a good opportunity to mention these are the 501 practice exams that i wrote i wrote every question that's in here all of these questions are original i know because i wrote all of them none of them were copied from another source they are all questions that are ones that now the style of the question is similar to the style of the way the questions are asked on the exam because i tried to channel the author and to present the same same voice as the actual exam might provide to you so the style of the questions has the same pentameter the same uh format as what you would expect to find on the exam but the question is completely different than anything you would find on the exam because that's the way it's supposed to work um that's what i do with the 501 same thing with the 601 601 slightly different in style the 601 exam has a little bit of a different approach to the questions not dramatically different but slightly different than the 501 exam so my 601 questions i'm going back and modifying how these questions are asked on the 601 uh practice exams so that's i think where you're ever in a position where you are really trying to get a good set of questions go to legitimate sources for your questions don't get them off the internet on random sites uh you will you will simply run into that all the time i think you are right to rethink that this doesn't look right this doesn't seem to be something i should be using for my studies and you're absolutely right it isn't it's not an appropriate way you you don't learn anything you're not going to getting a certification that has no value to you certainly and at the end of the day you need to be able to do your job once you get that job and if you don't know the material how are you supposed to do that so that's my recommendation to you is to find uh some questions and answers but find them from sources that you know to be um legitimate and i think you'll be fine so i appreciate the call that's a always a challenge to find good materials isn't it and that's i think um the concern here that's why i work so hard to make sure my materials are of a quality and a standard and a legitimacy because what what good is it just to distribute actual actual exam materials makes no sense whatsoever uh to be able to do that uh in the chat room uh fifty dollars from uh from dinka i think that's how you would say that uh what a nice donation and thank you received your a plus certification last wednesday 100 due to professor messer's youtube videos not exactly how i recommend people do it but i built the course so that it would cover every single exam objective and for people that study better from videos why not be able to use a comprehensive course to be able to do that congratulations on your new a plus certifications and now you're using the same materials or the network plus materials to prepare for network plus congratulations to be able to do that uh great certification to have in your pocket by the way so it's got to feel good to have that a plus certification done last wednesday because you've had to go through two exams to get to that point so congratulations there in a way network plus might be a little bit easier it's only one exam that you have to study for so maybe that will help you a little bit for those of you keeping track of network plus and here's my recommendation um i think we'll probably see the n1008 released in september that was the date that they talked about in october of last year uh so that's about the time frame i would probably expect that to be available and the rumors are what what people are saying on the support lines from comptia is that the existing network plus is still going to be around into june of 2022. so to your point if you're studying right now for your network plus that's the version you should be studying so absolutely do that um study using those materials take your intent 0 007. heck if you start studying now for network plus you'll already be network plus certified before the new version is even released that's how far down the road we're talking about so that's that's the key is finding those things i think that that makes sense in the chat room bob's asked uh can can we see some phishing emails from my spam box well on the video i did on spam i literally pulled those emails into that video minutes before making the video so i just grabbed whatever spam was in my inbox and put it there a lot of the spam that's in my spam folder is probably things that are inappropriate anyway um you know spammers aren't real good with uh knowing what is safe for work or not so instead of looking uh without any type of uncontrolled views into my with the uncontrolled views into my mailbox i think it's better if you just go back and look at the spam uh spam piece maybe i'll i'll start collecting some interesting spam and just start publishing it here's my interesting spam of the week and see if we can find some of those things um this last week the more interesting things i thought were with the pipeline shutdown and what was happening with the pipeline shutdown and we've been sort of watching this here at messer studios it's hard because there's not a lot of information what i found interesting about this pipeline issue that we had was the the people that were behind the pipeline infection were not necessarily the people that created the ransomware i don't think a lot of people realized that the colonial pipeline infection was done by ransomware as a service it was it was a cloud service so the people that made the ransomware are very good at making ransomware and they tell other people we're not good at hacking into places but if you can hack into a place and get the ransomware on those systems we will give you a percentage of the profit this is what dart this is the organization dark side that was behind the ransomware so the people that actually infected the systems and we still aren't quite certain yet if the systems were on the um on the company side or if they ever got into the industrial control systems or not but the folks that got that put the infection in their network may not be dark side that may be somebody completely different and probably was um obviously dark side uh it was it was kind of a double the way they do ransomware these days is not just to put your systems into an encrypted form but they take your data and then they also say that we're going to release your data publicly on the internet so it's a double whammy like you have to pay them not to publish your data and you have to pay them to get the decryption key and that's why there's there's stories mentioning that colonial paid five million dollars to darkseid to be able to prevent the publishing of their data and to get the decryption keys um and and quite quite interesting uh what happened with that we don't know a lot of details about the ransomware specifically and what what the exact infected type of ransomware was we don't know what flavor was put on the systems uh but it was also right after that happened and they had to shut down everything what we believe is they they were infected on the corporate side and they shut down to prevent an infection of the industrial control systems but even then we don't know that was the case uh we're just speculating based on the articles that we have out there and of course most of those articles are wrong anyway as i've mentioned earlier but what i thought was great about it was they immediately on the dark side immediately put out a statement that said okay we didn't mean to bring down the the pipeline we didn't mean to bring an entire country's fuel supply to its knees and cause outages and cause problems with fuel supply that wasn't our intention please don't hurt us was effectively what that meant because i don't know if you've noticed anything about the oil companies and oil in general but it tends to start wars there tends to be a lot of very uh powerful people who will come after you if you mess around with that and certainly they felt some of that pressure and as some of you noticed um about a day after they put that notice out all of their servers were gone all of their dns entries were deleted everything disappeared on the dark side all of their where we believe their their cryptocurrency was was gone where their web server gone their anything they had wasn't suddenly removed from the internet how that happened was that a governmental entity was it a private entity whoever did it remove darkseid from everything there was in the internet maybe darkseid did it maybe they took everything down they just felt the pressure we don't know um but they'll of course rebuild as the next big thing whatever the next thing will be darkside 2 will be the next one coming up and we'll have more ransomware as a service it's just another phase along the lines at this point there's no more news about it the only media i've seen about it recently in recent days was that uh aren't we badly positioned for ransomware everybody's complaining that we aren't we aren't covered for uh cyber security in this country which is uh a a statement only a a politician or someone in journalism could ever make because you're just completely oblivious to what we do in this country regarding cyber security and then the type of experts we have in cyber security in this country so it was that's just ignorance but that's okay we would expect that from published people need clicks that's the only way that people make money on the internet is for people to click on things and having an article that is um that gets people riled up or gets them excited or angry is a very common way to uh to get clicks but we know in i.t security and the people that are familiar with what we do in this industry is that we are well positioned this particular company was not well positioned for whatever reason um and of course some of you that have been looking at job postings you'll notice that there was a job posting for an i.t security uh director for that uh and i agree uh captain crunchy crunky crunky key 23 in chat room you are correct brian krebs on krebsonsecurity.com had great coverage on this and he will continue he's one of the best places to go for tell me what's really going on out there um i think that's that's the great thing is we got plenty of places to go to that do have good coverage brian krebs is probably those he is the one outside the scope i mentioned i always tell you that if it's in an article online it's probably wrong unless it's someone who does this if it's a security blog if it is a brian krebs if it's somebody in the industry like one of us then it's going to be relatively accurate you're going to going to really have good information when it's vox you know they try when it's you know other news sources they try really hard to get it right but they can't there's just no way they can get it accurate they are not technologists we would not expect them to get it 100 correct they they get close but for for those of us in the industry that really need the actual really what's going on there you really have to go to krebs on security and other specific sites um the others are just kind of trying to keep people up and up to date with what's going on and that's why i always have people in my family call me and say did you hear they have a no they don't they don't whatever you read there is not true that's not what happened so you kind of have to temper the family members with what the reality is and what maybe speculation is and what we really sort of have found out behind the scenes um we're probably not going to know much more about colonial and what happened there i don't know if we ever will they may not tell us anything or they might give us a little bit of an overview just because it was so public but it's a don't ever let what what's the what's the rule in politics don't ever let a good crisis go to waste so that was a really good crisis so now we get to see everything else that happens behind the scenes uh is now they're gonna they're gonna create their own reality of those things we're going to try to focus on the bits and bytes we're going to try to focus on what really happened there and try to piece together and the politics and everything else is going to happen anyway behind the scenes or in front of us as the case may be but whatever happens we are going to focus here at least in this room i try to focus on what really happened there we'll let the politics deal with itself there's plenty of other sites you can go to to to argue about the politics side let's figure out how did they get on the network what did it really do how did that malware operate uh what information do we think was sent out uh how did they manage to get those servers taken down that's what i'm more interested in i'm more interested in the bits and bytes how did they make that work i want to pull the engine apart i want to see what what's inside that carburetor and that's what i like doing is to have that to that point if your organization doesn't have a policy or set of processes in place for completely removing a system from the network and rebuilding it easily then you are at risk and that is the thing that i think everybody should be thinking about that's our takeaway from this even knowing nothing else about this scenario do you have a way if your system got ransomware right now as we are talking your system where bloop the message came up said everything here has been deleted and now you have to rebuild the system could you do it and how quickly could you do it you know that's the important part now there's another challenge there if they get your data they're probably going to threaten you with putting that data on the internet you have to pay them not to publish your data that's a completely different thing we have to worry about but in the meantime do we have a way to recover so that our pipeline doesn't stop and that's the important part of this uh it's always your best bet whenever you get infected is you burn everything to the ground and you rebuild from scratch always now i know for those of you that took the a plus that you know there is a process for recovering malware you go through the process of removing it from the network and then you disable the the backup systems then you go through an update antivirus then you remove the virus then you turn everything back on well that's if you have to get data off the machine but once you finish all that then you delete everything you rebuild it from scratch or known go back up that is the only way you would be 100 sure that you were able to remove every part of that malware from your network so everybody that you read about in the news who has been infected with one of these types of situations they have to delete everything and they have to rebuild everything back so this is a relatively big undertaking so it's not something that that happens overnight in some cases or maybe it can if you have the right processes in place what if you have the right processes where you have offline backups and you could delete everything on a floor click a button and have everything rebuild itself automatically those systems exist the way to do that exists do you have that process in place and if you don't have it in place at work do you have it in place at home you have in things on your computer right now that are very valuable to you there are pictures there is documents there's all kinds of information so make sure you have backups you have a backup of the backup you have an offline version of the backup so that this machine's infected it can't touch that backup system those are things to think about maybe some of it's in the cloud maybe if some of it's local you get to decide what makes sense for you but i would i would definitely recommend that uh question the chat room has the 601 replaced the 501 well we're currently in an overlap period where both the 601 and the 501 exist at the same time but the 501 will retire on july 31st and the 601 will continue after that so it has not technically not replaced it yet it is uh both of them exist at the same time currently which is just for fun um on this side because there's constant confusion about which one do i take is do i take the one do i not take the one uh would i still recommend taking the 501 test that's the logical next question you have two and a half months just under two and a half months can you get through all of the security plus materials in two and a half months you might be able to it's cutting it very close but you possibly could at this point it takes me about five to six months for let's say four to six months to study for an exam for me because i got other stuff going on i got a job i got things happening at home i got responsibilities i got life and it takes me about four to six months to study for a certification exam if we sit here today on may 19th and i'm trying to decide which one do i take the 501 or 601 i study for the 601 because there's no way i'm going to make the deadline for the 501 plus i don't do well under that level of pressure don't put me in a corner don't don't do that don't tell me oh this needs to be done next week this needs to be done by july 31st okay that's not going to happen don't give me a deadline it's only setting yourself up for disappointment that's all that is thank you for your deadline i hope you don't realize that i care what that deadline is because i don't i can't it will be i will finish it as soon as i possibly can whenever that is i don't know that's why you'll notice i never set deadlines for the release of my videos i never set deadlines for the release of my books because all it will do is ultimately create a product that is of less quality because i'm pushing towards a date why don't i make the best possible product i can and then when i'm done with it i release it that's crazy but that's what i do but when i'm the only one having to worry about it i can do that that's one of the huge advantages i have as a publisher is that i get to do that that's my way of publishing i don't have to deal with third party i'm not focused on any particular date i just create it make it as good as i can make it if i need to spend an extra day making a little bit better i spend an extra day making a little bit better so that's it yeah i guess these shows these these study groups are the only deadline i really have which is we're going to do a study group on wednesday but i have such a lead time i i know it's coming and it takes me half a day to prepare for these so that's that's that's the part where i worry about so i i have to spend that half a day creating the questions and answers for this and then once i do that i'm done then we're ready i usually do that on the weekend so it's not not a hard one to do i've already blocked out the time so it's not really a deadline it's really you're just preparing for the normal things you're doing in your job so i think that's that's that's the key uh i know game developers don't even come close to doing that do they they pick a day the manager picks a day and then drives the developers to releasing the product on that day is it ready on that day no well they publish on that day yeah that's the will so uh i don't work that way i'm glad i'm not publisher i am a game publisher anyway um i i focus on because i don't know i'm looking at the 501 practice exams i need to create a set of 601 practice exams some of these questions will be in the 601 book although they will probably be modified to fit the 601 style but only half of this will so i got to write another half of this book that's a thick book so i got to write i got to write that much well how long is it going to take me to write that much i don't know a week two weeks a month two months i don't know uh based on i've already got a third of it done and that went relatively quick the second third is going to take a little bit longer so maybe in a month we'll be done with this it'll be out maybe it won't be you know we just don't know so i don't i don't set dates because all it does is is create an expectation and ultimately disappointment that's that's all it does uh that's that's the real key uh is the 601 an easier exam and more promising to its objectives than the 501 i don't know what that means um but i don't think it's an easier exam i think it's just as difficult as the 501 exam um and it stays as it is close the 501 stays very close to exam objectives the 601 stays very close to exam objectives they don't really deviate from the objectives on these exams thankfully so it's it's not that it is easier or harder of an exam to take i think the exams are comparable except the 601 is so much more information it's a lot more information um and the scope i guess i'm not getting that across so let me let me pull up the list of just how much information this happens to be so on the 601 objectives just so we can talk real numbers uh on the 501 exam if you were to count up the number of objectives on the exam there are 778 objectives on the 501 exam almost 800 objectives 800 things you need to know for the 501. oh but wait on the 601 1038 objectives for a 33.42 increase so it's a third larger that's a big huge number so you're talking 300 200 and something more objectives that you have to know that's a lot more to study and that's why it's a harder exam to study for the actual study part is is easy to do that now here's the challenge on the 601 exam 1038 objectives 529 of them are brand new 51 of the exam is brand new to the 601 so it's it's practically a new certification exam at least half of it is brand new uh but what i found is that it's not entirely new sections what they've done is add additional content to the existing topics because security did not change in three years people keep telling me it's so different now it's not it's not different at all we still have the cloud we still have ransomware we still have these same technologies it's not like we suddenly came up with a whole brand new set of security issues um the the focus on the exam has changed a little bit more they have a little bit more cloud they have a little bit more application development i don't know but there it is um but things that you have to know for the 601 exam is it too much it is it's too big it's too big of an exam but i think they they wanted to fit certain topics in here and that's what they did and it's really really big it's the biggest single certification exam that uh i probably the comptia makes certainly one of the largest and much larger than the 501 so there's your breakdown as far as numbers are concerned is that um it's it's immense it's a big exam so it's still 90 minutes it's still 90 questions but they can pull from from hundreds more topics that you have to learn to be able to take the exam and that's why i tell people if you have the ability if you've been studying for the 501 and you can take that one go take it it's an easier exam to study for and it's going to be an easier exam to pass but some of us don't have that luxury so we just have to study more to get all of those topics down to be able to figure that out so is that potentially 12 objectives per minute no you still get the same number object objectives per minute you still only have 90 possible questions on the exam but they could be from a much larger pool so that's that's the key the exam that's i think people get confused over that and some people have said no i've heard the 601s easier well i think that the actual test taking process and the complexity of the questions is comparable to the 501. i don't think it's easier or harder than the 501 to take the exam but you have to know so much more to take the 601 that's what makes it harder so that's i think that's where people get a little concerned is that they they aren't taking into account just how big the scope has increased 33 larger 33.42 larger that's big to be able to do that so that's why i tell people don't uh mess around the 501 was hard already that was a that's a difficult exam to pass now add 200 something more objectives to it makes it harder is it still five performance-based questions well we don't know it's a handful it's a certain number of performance-based questions at the beginning so yes you get a certain number of performance-based questions at the beginning it's random for every person and then the rest of it is multiple choice questions the format has not changed the structure has not changed the process has not changed the number of questions hasn't changed the style of the exam has not changed dramatically um but just the the scope is much bigger scope is much larger uh to have there but uh i i think as as we get into it and if this will be a conversation that's pointless at the end of july because at the end of july it's only the 601 is left so we will never have that conversation after that but i think that's for those of you studying for your 501 keep doing that that's my recommendation to you and if you're if you're trying to figure out which one's harder go look at the objectives they'll tell you which one's harder it's obvious which one's harder uh there's there's no way to make an argument that studying 200 and something more objectives is somehow easier that's a ridiculous statement um which i've seen no it's impossible uh nobody it was and this is somebody who made a video i have video series and every objective was covered it was a massive video series this is the biggest video series we ever did it is massive um and and i can't imagine having taken the 501 and seeing the 601 that somebody could look at both of those and say oh yeah 601's easier that's there's no way there's no possible way that's the case because there's a laws of physics apply and i have to spend time learning those extra 200 something objectives so you can't get away from that that's that's always going to be there and they're not simple objectives these are complex things to know um an example uh what they're mentioning the chat room right now uh is that there's very few command line utilities that you have to know in the 501 you know there's trace route there's dig there's netstat there's those types in the 501 the 601 there's twice as many we have to know you have to know about the harvester you have to know about some scanning proxies you have to understand uh some ocean utilities it's extensive so there's as much there's more hands-on on the 601 than there was in the 501 and the problem of course is they don't ask you hands-on questions really about a lot of them on the exam they ask you how you would use these things that's that's one of those challenges hopefully you'll be able to look through those exam objectives yourself become familiar with them understand what you would run into i think that will help you on your exam too uh why can't you buy the hard copy of the 501 notes only the 601 i don't know why you can't because the option's there it's a button that's right underneath the pricing block block where you can switch between digital and physical because here's the physical here's the hard copy you can buy them right there on the page uh the 601 sales page has a tab that moves you between the digital and physical makes it so easy it doesn't work that way on the 501 page yet i'm working on switching that out but that's one of those that i got to write a book first and then we'll switch that out but there is a button right underneath the price chart where you can switch the physical version um and and uh and purchase those if you need to it's just not obvious is it i didn't do a very good job with that but i will fix it it's it's there i know i know nobody saw the option very few people see the option because i kind of hit it there underneath the block of pricing but there's a block i don't know why i'm saying this if only there was a way visually i could show you in some way i've only had some type of video switching system that would bring up the list of these things uh when we would look at it this this would be really really helpful uh so let me bring up bring that up you would think that i would have had this all ready to go everybody so let's do that uh let's go to my website and under there we go let me put my head in the picture there we go uh so 501 uh let's look at course notes so when you bring this up well thank you google for the the advertisement but i don't need to to know about that so right underneath the pricing chart is this little button that says looking for a physical edition click here so if you click that it takes you to a completely different page that doesn't look like a completely different page which is part of the confusion it takes you to this page so now it's the same page except it's showing you physical edition so there's the physical course notes and the physical practice exams and the physical exam combo the physical success bundle so that's why i know it is sneaky i apologize and right here it says now that you're on the physical page looking for digital click here part of well there's a reason that it happened this way it's a reason it got built that way uh part of its uh is i did a bad job because i'm not that great at building a web page and the second part is that i came out with the digital products first and then i added on the physical not a great way to do it if you are buying the 601 um it's different um because you would go the 601 page and you've got a tab here across the top that says digital edition physical edition digital edition see how easy that is why didn't i do that to start with that's that's the way it should be done that makes sense and then i've got other physical things to add to this i need to add other pieces to that um to get that that ready uh but i'm working on that we will get there look at that fella what's going on there so that's uh that's what that's why i apologize that it's a mess but that's how i build a website that's how i do things is uh not very well but i'm getting there i'm figuring out based on your feedback to me which is a constant and directed uh i do make changes and i don't take it personally so uh there's very i've over the years there's practically nothing that you can tell me on the internet that i take personally so practically everything you give me whether it's done in a good or bad way there's a little bit of truth in there and i try to take the truth out of it and make things better that's all you can do um and then i then i delete the email and i forget about you so that's that's a learned process over time uh so in in the chat room quick question what's easier the 501 or 601 thanks thanks for joining us uh you'll want to rewind about 20 minutes and you'll get that uh and people also hear saying i've been getting this ad pop-up on the website was that supposed to happen you saw one come up when i was here on my website uh that is supposed to happen it's a new style of advertisement from google you'll probably see it on other websites as well it's called a google vignette um and it is no don't use ad block that is not what you should do on my site you should create an ad block exception for professormesser.com and then you simply close those when they show up on your screen that's what you're supposed to have to do and those are normal they're not you aren't infected with malware and you'll even see at the top it has google vignette in the top of that of that page maybe i could find another one maybe i can just go around my website and we'll see if i can get it to to pop one of those up for you uh because it's it is uh it turns out to be a uh just another way that google can provide advertising and a lot of what we do to keep things going because all of our videos are free i have to stick some type of advertising on there so that's what um that's why you'll see those things pop up i hope i wish there was some way that i could make free videos but somehow not have the advertising piece of it there um why should you only use adblock on my website no you should use adblock on every website but mine that was my intention of telling you my site should be an exception to your ad block that's okay now you're with it i think you're joshing me i think you're spoofing me it is a way that we support what we do here the advertising every little thing we do sort of helps there's no one big thing that i can point to to keep going there uh but um i realize advertising on a website is annoying and you'll notice uh i've been making some changes to the website recently there are fewer ads on my site than they have ever been so i'm i am sensitive to this as well i wish i didn't have to have any and maybe someday we'll get to that where we don't have to have any advertising on the website whatsoever um but right now it really helps keep things going i can keep lori uh working for the company i can i can do things uh and make plans uh with this you keep the lights on you keep all of these things happening so unfortunately it's just one of those that that's our model uh if i got rid of those ads i'd have to have other ads doing different things um and i don't you don't ever hear me doing a live read on a video for a vpn uh company you'll never see me or at least you haven't seen me doing any live reads for uh apps and games you can have on your mobile device um i try to stay away from that i try to make the advertising as as relatively low-key as possible loki no low-key as possible so yes no i didn't even i didn't say the name and people in the chat room were going oh yeah i know what game you're talking about uh that one no that's why don't do it uh they must pay really well though by the way because i see them on some big name sites on big videos they must pay really good or or maybe the others people are just needing that revenue fortunately we're doing okay here you are watching the videos um what you're doing is working so we're gonna keep going that um that's that's the important thing here um does lori have her security plus she doesn't thanks for asking she does not yet have her security plus but she doesn't write the content uh i give her things to post and she posts it so she relies on me as the security plus content creator and then i rely on her to make sure you see it uh it's a good combination i think so we'll we'll go that way um since we're getting into sort of the last parts of this other questions in the chat room um what games do i play on xbox this is of course uh i mentioned this on earlier study groups is that in my off time i try to get out of this room and uh i don't tend to do gaming on my computer even though i think there are better games for the pc and mac platform i i wouldn't say better but more detailed feature-rich games on that platform i just don't want to be in here i just don't want to be in here this long i want to go lean back when i do my gaming so i want to get a big comfy chair and just do something relatively straightforward my friends online and uh and shoot at people so that's uh what games do i play right now not many we are in a time where i'm creating content i'm creating these uh course notes and practice exams and videos so my spare time tends to be very cyclical where if i'm putting one of these things together at i'm working all day and all night on finishing this up because as soon as i do that now i can go do other things at night i can do some of this during the day but it's it's very cyclical where i could think you want me to get this book done as quickly as possible as well and i want to get it done as quickly as possible so i just don't game right now but when that's over i'll probably get back into division two or elite dangerous or something that has some depth to it some challenge and options that i can really work with i like the rpg sort of idea um because you can you can really start theory crafting things i love the theory crafting side of it i like optimization of skills slash weapons slash things uh i like that uh and sort of customizing it to your own way of playing i'm not much into the rocket league or short term uh you play a game it's it's five minutes long and then you're out or in my case uh especially if it's one where uh you play until you die i'm in for 30 seconds and then i'm done so that's that's my problem uh i'm not that person either a real challenge to make that happen um that's uh and some people are mentioning um entering the field of i.t in the chat room uh in i.t getting finding what people want you to have and most of the time that's the a plus the a plus tends to be the entry point into information technology whether an employer is specifically asking for it or you need the knowledge that it brings that's a good place to start so i think that's that's what you want to do is be that that first enter that first uh foray into it i think a plus is a good way to get there there are other options out there microsoft has some entry-level certs um really they're the other big player in entry level it's microsoft and and comptia and comptia tends to have the market uh it's much more well well-known and much more accepted so i think that's that's uh that's the way to go for for those two things um the answer the quick answer for those you asking is five and one or six or one easier 501 is except it retires on july 31st which means you i may have to go with 601. there's no word there's no one answer this overlap period is always a challenge it's a timing issue isn't it we got to figure out uh for these yeah don't really do chess um i like chess but just uh no i i like to have an involved game with lots of moving parts and pieces complexity i like the complexity i like the but i like i like it to be something i can sit on the xbox and do i've been trying to get my hands on the newest xbox since november they're just not available that's my next big thing um i used to do a lot of wow don't do much wow anymore because it involves sitting in front of the computer i don't do that um if the if maybe later on i can find a way to sit back in a different room and do it differently but that's that's the real challenge with gaming right now so i just don't have time to work through it i have been looking at the wi-fi frag vulnerabilities some of which are relatively esoteric and and not something we have to worry about others may involve a little bit of tweaking to the standard but it doesn't look like it's something that is uh an enormous issue at the moment for most operating systems especially if you stay up to date it's going to be a real concern for people who don't update and upgrade and get security patches certainly um that's that's the key i think for for staying on top of that one uh but i don't think everybody understands the full scope of the wi-fi frag either i guess it depends on what the bad guys are able to do with it we're all very concerned about wi-fi wi-fi is always an issue in every organization so staying on top of that one's going to be interesting i need to do more reading up on the paper that they uh released because it was some pretty good stuff if you have a chance to read through some of the wi-fi frag the the technology behind it's remarkable what they were able to do with the standard and the holes that they found were great but as as we find with many things related to security much of the wi-fi frag issue is as much an implementation problem as it is a problem with the standard so if you have a standard but you implement it incorrectly then you have made something less secure we see this all the time with cryptography and that's one of the things now there's parts of the wi-fi frag that clearly are part their standard issue we have to change the standard we have to fix the standard uh to to really fix the problem and i think what we may find is some companies will tweak their drivers a bit to prevent those types of things from happening even though they don't they go outside the scope of the standard we'll see if that's what happens i think that's going to be pretty pretty easy to find people doing that um and keeping things safe because we use wi-fi so much uh and how those things work well that brings us to the end of another uh study group we've got a lot of things we went through this time i want to thank you for being here in this first hour where i did the q a and then this is uh really the second and third hour was all about questions from the chat room it always gets good there near the end because we get off topic and i kind of like doing the off-topic questions sometimes uh a little bit more than some of the others uh as they mentioned the chat room 73 days until the security plus 501 expires thank you for that countdown that's not a lot of time if you're studying just starting today for security plus you may want to look at going with the 601 instead unless you're really planning to jump into it and finish it up before it goes away there will be people taking the cert the 501 certification exam on the last day it's offered there always is uh i would not recommend doing that i would recommend really shooting well beyond that and 601 may be that point this may be the point where we really start saying ah go take the 601. i think that's that's probably going to position everybody from from uh worrying about when it happens i think that's that's the good one to think about so hopefully that will that will get you going in the right direction or at least get you thinking about what direction you would like to go i want to see you earn that security plus certification whatever we can do on this side to get you to that goal we're going to do it we'll be back next month with another security plus study group there will probably hopefully by then maybe be a practice exam book available the course notes are already available on the website your support has been tremendous thank you so much through this entire process we're more than happy to make these 601 videos available to you we're so glad that process is complete go use them go earn that security plus certification get it in your pocket and go get that security plus job thanks for being here and we'll see you next time on the security plus study group thanks everyone you

Channel: Professor Messer

Views: 36,782

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: 2yn2gTag1O0

Length: 188min 8sec (11288 seconds)

Published: Wed May 19 2021