Don’t worry by the end of reading this article we will help you in understanding the cyber space and moving towards the right direction.
First of all, just like any other IT domain, IT security domain is like a huge subject, and no single person can become an expert hacker in a predefined period of time. It takes effort, practice and a lot of time to expertise the art of ethical hacking. Especially IT security involves a lot of challenges to overcome, lots of information to learn, and lots of ways to improve ourselves over time. If you think you are up for the challenge, follow along where we explain how to get started and proceed further.
First of all, IT Security can be mainly divided into two major parts:
Offensive Security is where people do operations like Ethical Hacking, and Penetration Testing etc, to test and find out what kind of problems are in IT Infrastructure before any real hacker penetrates and damages the data. Here Ethical Hackers and Penetration Testers will think and act like hackers to uncover any possibilities that a hacker can use to break into the IT infrastructure. But Ethical Hackers and Penetration Testers will not do any harm to the data or information, that is why they are called as White Hat Hackers, they will help organisations and people to protect themselves from the malicious hackers.
Defensive Security is where people will try to provide the maximum security they can provide by doing everything they can, Antivirus Companies, IDS, IPS, Firewalls, UTM, DDoS Protection Systems and other End-Point security mechanisms will come under defensive security, where they will try to prevent an intrusion by constantly monitoring, observing and maintaining security operations.
Simply put, if you have a laptop and if you install an antivirus program, and enable a firewall, those operations come under defensive security. But still hackers can use some loopholes in any of those technologies to compromise your device, so to prevent that you can recruit an ethical hacker or penetration tester, These white hat hackers will try to hack your device in every possible way that a hacker can use and will provide you a detailed report explaining every step they have taken to compromise your device, but in the process unlike the black-hat hackers they do not steal or damage your data in the process, which makes it very helpful for us to find out the issues we have in our systems without any data loss or privacy issues. That is the reason why ethical hacking or penetration testing is becoming more and more popular, useful and viable option for any individual or organization that cares about their security.
So, if you want to become an ethical hacker or penetration tester then there are multiple globally recognized organizations which are providing IT security training and certification programs. Enrolling in one of those training programs will help you to understand IT security and how to be a part of it.
Out of which the first and most suitable path for you to take is EC-Council Certified Ethical Hacker Program. The reason why we suggest this course is:
After this basic course you will have a wide variety of paths and areas to dive into them and explore and grab all the knowledge you can. From there as time passes by you can upgrade and increase your knowledge with EC-Council security analyst and then later licensed penetration tester or you can choose computer hacking forensic investigator and a lot of other courses to shape your IT security career.
If you are more interested in defensive security, the best place to start is the security operations centre (SOC), in this section of IT security, professionals are needed to constantly monitor and analyse the incoming traffic to detect any kind of potential attacks, which is again a very crucial part in defending organization’s infrastructure.
So SOC course lets you understand the different attacks and several logging and monitoring mechanisms, and will discuss in detailed explanation of security information and event management tools also known as SIEM tools (Ex: QRadar, Splunk, etc) which gives a clear view of organization’s security structure all in one place.
Once you master the skills of SOC analyst you can upgrade and increase your skill with incident response and disaster recovery and other next level courses to complement and enrich your existing skill set. As mentioned before constant learning is the only thing that makes you a better IT security professional but not a particular course or a certification.
I really hope we clarified some questions and shed light on some important ways to be a part of the IT security community. To keep this post short and concise we just discussed two paths, we will discuss more about them in future posts.