Good place to pick up on cybersecurity?

Hey yall, I'm thinking of entering the cybersec industry upom graduation. But my background's entirely in programming and software dev - C, C++, Java, Python, Embedded etc. I have a general working understanding of com security such as Acess Lists, Firewalls, cryptography etc. Any suggestions on how I could get started prepping myself?

 

Congratulations on graduating soon! I remember those days

TBH, you are in a perfect position. Same exact spot as I was, and now I'm a Security Engineer. To me, Cybersecurity was always a niche topic because there's things like Network security, database hardening, file encryption, secure programming, etc etc.

If you haven't picked up on UNIX/Linux & OR Window Server 2K8, 2K12, 2K16, VM's, servers/data centers, general networking topics (OSI model, what is VPN, etc). Those are all great starts into entering this realm. Or at least I had very good success on getting an internship with just the above topics I listed.

If you already know that fancy and dandy stuff, then I'd jump into learning cybersecurity terminology.

This guy offers free YouTube videos with entire DOC references to each video for Comptia Security+. (P.S. There are so much tutorials out there, I can't remember what I used).

Professor Messer's CompTIA SY0-501 Security+ Course | Professor Messer IT Certification Training Courses

TBH, if you know what malware/virus/root kits, etc are. You will be in pretty good shape when applying for entry level positions.

I started off as a SOC analyst doing hard disk encryptions, OS patching via SCCM for Windows / Ansible for Unix/Linux, Splunk/ELK stack (App stacks that allow you to view and monitoring logs like security, DNS, DHCP, etc), random tickets that dealt with Virus/Malware removal and protection ETC ETC.

This is just a general overview on how I got it in with what I learned. It may or may not help you.

Best of luck! Security is fun, unless there is ransomware infecting all of your companies PCs and "certain" people did not register for our paid Carbonite weekly backups like they were supposed to...

 

good advice @Koy

I am wondering what kind of things you deal with now as a Security engineer and how different it is compare to being SOC analyst

 

Hey Man,

Not much different other than as a Security Engineer I'm more like 2nd/3rd level support for the SOC guys. Also, I'm more tied into processes and work with the Security Architects on threat detection, IPS/IDS, and threat modeling. I also assist some of our Incident Response folks with larger attacks or tricky vulnerabilities. Sometimes Pen testing, but I like doing more front line analysis with actual threats or compromises. Oh yeah, higher pay rate for sure

Both very fun, and a good amount of down time as long as you have the correct monitoring/alerting