Brianne Fahey

review

Packet Analyzing

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I recently finished Chris Sanders‘ Applied Network Defense online course for Practical Packet Analysis.  Before I give you my impressions of the course, let me give you an idea of where I’m coming from and what I expected.

I never captured a packet before mid-2017.

I knew I’d need some practice analyzing packets to maximize my experience in the SANS SEC503; Intrusion Detection in Depth course later this year. I’ve never had a job role that gave me the opportunity to work hands-on with networks so at times networking can be an Achilles heel of mine. I’ve done a lot of reading and a little bit of experimenting at home, so I was eager to pour myself into some labs and figure out what I could do and what I needed to work harder toward.

I purchased myself a course license and started chipping away at the materials in September.  I also bought a copy of Chris’s Practical Packet Analysis book through No Starch to use as a reference.

The Practical Packet Analysis course runs on demand (you can start as soon as you purchase a license) and includes more than 100 videos and more than 20 lab exercises. It’s available to you for 6 months.  I worked on it off and on a few hours a week for about 5 months and I noted a few lectures and labs I’d like to revisit in my last few weeks of access.  Because it was that good.

This course covers so much material.

It does a really incredible job of incrementally walking the student through progressively more specific and challenging material.  You start off with some high level network concepts and a lot of attention to the OSI Model, work into understanding how those protocols and activities manifest in real life, and then top it off with learning to efficiently comb through the packets captured from this network activity with tcpdump and Wireshark.

This course is worth every hour you put into it.

I will be able to use things I learned in this course immediately, even without needing to analyze packets daily in my day job. The lectures are well communicated. The material is current and specific.  Chris Sanders doesn’t lean on expensive tools or on only one way to approach a question.  He teaches you to think it through and answers questions by providing applicable advice instead of answers.  Certainly you can skim past sections you already know and visit subjects you’re struggling with more than once.  I particularly benefited from focusing on understanding the explanations for the malware labs analysis, examining HTTP responses, carving out transferred files, and exploring traffic manipulation.

I’m pleased to have finished the course and definitely open to taking any of the other Applied Network Defense Courses when I need to go deeper into the other available subjects.

Information Security Writing

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Learn a byte at a time.

About a month into the year, I’ve completed my first planned personal training goals: Chris Sanders’ Applied Network Defense course called Effective Information Security Writing.

This course is absolutely worth the cost!

Write Now, Reference Later

I’m a firm believer in capturing information while you’re attaining it with the goal of ultimately having a polished reference page or standard operating procedure. My process involves creating a lot of short & sweet OneNote pages as things are happening that I can revisit to combine, order, and edit later.

Writing things down is not a popular pastime among my peers. Events come in high volumes and move fast.  Capturing details seems like a luxury. I never regretted having a slick wiki page to reference when I was on-call or entering an incident analysis cold. I figured no one was into using my help pages as much as me until I was contacted via LinkedIn by a colleague from a former job to thank me for writing guides five years earlier for a tool he just inherited without much time to get up to speed.

What worked for me?

The Effective Information Security Course offered a mix of videos, exercises, templates, and online discussion.  I’d recommend it to anyone who is asked to write documentation, even if it is not the exact types of reports this course covers. The course is extremely relevant if you’re already writing reports for pen tests, vulnerability compromise reports, or case notes.

Taking time to see something through another person’s point of view often reveals your own biases and blocks to help you become aware of how you can improve. I learned that the executive summary is typically the last section of a report you write – not the first as I had been doing.  This makes total sense. Get out the long parts first and then condense it down into the highlights.  Seems so obvious but since it was logistically first int he report, it never occurred to me to write it at the end. Simple and impactful.

Completion Note

 

I thrive on courses that are flexible, and that don’t require me to be sitting a a computer the entire duration.  I could take a walk and listen to a few lectures – then settle in at my desk to try the exercises. I finished the course in roughly 10 hours over a month of nights and weekends. I started both EISW and Practical Packet Analysis at about the same time since I knew the latter would require much more attention (and time).  I had no trouble switching back and forth between the two courses while keeping track of the path and the ideas in the lessons.

Find out for yourself!

Check out the course details and consider adding this one to your own personal plan.