How to start with Cyber Security?

In this article, I will direct you to the right pathway to get into Cyber Security. I will be doing a lot of tutorials and lessons videos, make sure you subscribe and turn the notification on to stay up-to-date on every news.

Introduction

Since the start of covid 19, the world turned virtual and digital. We started to hear for the first-time sentences like, “working from home” and “learning online”. The only possible way that people could work and learn online is by connecting to the internet.

With unlimited use of the internet, our daily life threats transformed from physical attacks to cyber-attacks, and cyber security started to be a compulsory practice to save ourselves from various risks.

Today, I’m going to show you the pathway of getting into cyber security, and later on, in other articles, I’m gonna show you some tricks and teach you some skills, that help you to get into cyber security, or at least save you from cyber-attacks on your social media profiles and bank accounts, so if you are new here make sure you subscribe my Youtube channel, turn the notification on, and let’s get started.

Before we get into it, if you are interested in taking “free” courses with official certification from the best professors and universities in the world, like Harvard, UTS and many more, check my website fadyazzi.com slash /freecourses, the password for this month will be “cybermate”.

Getting into Cyber security

Getting into Cyber security, if you are new to this field or have a small idea, when you try to google “how to start a career in cyber security” you will find a lot of complex information that will blow your mind, you might hear people talking about a bunch of confusing certifications, like CISM, CISSP, CompTIA and many more, but I’m here to tell you, “They are not important”. Of course, there are many benefits of studying some certifications, but what is important, is your Skills and Experience. In cyber security, the way of applying your knowledge is much more important than what you theoretically know. The only way to improve your skills is by trying and practising. Try to install a virus and learn how it works, try to delete a file and try to recover it.
Here are the Top 5 Skills you must learn, to get into cyber security.

Number 1: Networking and telecommunication

This is the most important topic in cyber security, this is where you learn how devices communicate with each other, and how data travel far distances in seconds. Understanding the difference between IP address and mac address and their use will help you to understand how attackers think, mastering the “OSI Model” that stands for “Open Systems Interconnection” and understanding what each layer represents and does, is critical and a must. OSI model will help you to understand how data travel from your device to Google or Facebook servers for example, under a concept called “Request-Acknowledge-Receipt”, and if you have an issue with your connection, the OSI model will help you to find where the issue is.

Number 2: Set-up Virtual machines

After learning about networking, the best way to practice without affecting your computer is by set-up some VMs, and learn how to connect them and analyze the packets through Wireshark software or other software. VMs are usually referred to as “guest OS” run on the top of your computer operating system that we call “Host OS” and can be set up with a completely different configuration, so you will have different operating systems running on one computer, the software that manages this configuration called “Hypervisor”, there are a lot of popular hypervisors like “Hyper-V”, “VirtualBox” and “VMware”. Understanding the difference between Guest OS, Host OS and Hypervisor, will give you a wide idea about cloud computing systems, since Clouding means hundreds or thousands of VMs running on a big powerful server in another location. I’m going to teach you more about this topic in a separate video, so make sure you subscribe to this channel and turn the notification on to Stay Up to Date on every news.

Number 3: Learn Command Language

Bash is a Unix shell and a very powerful programing language, Linux OS uses bash and Mac OS uses a similar but easier version called Zsh”elle”, while Windows uses a different shell called PowerShell which has a very different way of use from the Linux Bash but with a similar concept. Why do we call it Shell? The important part of the operating system is in a section called “The Kernel” which is the core of the system, and the direct way to communicate or contact with the Kernel is through its Shell, that’s what makes Shell programming very powerful because it’s with direct contact with the Kernel. Let’s take the egg as an example, we have the yolk and the white covered by the shell, the only way to get into the core is by breaking the shell.

Number 4: System management

Understanding System Administration and what PID represents is very important, it will teach you when to communicate with the shell and when to communicate with the end software. Let’s take a company as an example, the way you talk with your colleague friend, is different than the way you talk with your manager, different than the way you talk with the CEO of the company, understanding the position of each person, will make your idea clear on the way of communication with everyone of them. Same with the computer system, PID indicates the position rank of each software, this will lead you to know how to talk with each software, for instance messing with the kernel is a high-risk chat since any wrong command can lead to a severe consequence, while playing around a normal software is a low-risk chat because in the worst-case scenario, you can restart your system, or remove then install that software again.

Number 5: Practicing Basics of Cyber Security

Nowadays, Cyber Security tools are getting popular, you can start by yourself, turn on the 2fa or MFA for your accounts, change the passwords every few months, use a very hard password with lower case and upper-case letters, numbers and symbols, and the most important point, use different passwords for different accounts or at least for your important ones. Many other free tools are available on the internet to start with cyber security, but when you first start learning, you will notice that the cyber security field is divided into different teams, you might hear a bunch of teams with hat colours, black hat, white hat, grey hat, and green hat, as a cyber security engineer, I want to tell you that these naming are not so accurate, the most famous teams in cyber security are 2, red hat team which is the offensive team, its job is to try to find the weak points in the system and expose them, in this way the company will knows its weak points, and try to fix and improve them. In another hand we have the blue hat team which is the defensive team, its job is to reduce the risks and weaknesses to the closest point to zero. Usually, the red hat team detect the flaws and report them to the blue team but sometimes a misunderstanding happens, that’s exactly why nowadays we are starting to hear more often of a purple team, the purple team is a combination of red and blue team, and they know both skills, their job is to facilitate the communication between the 2 teams. In a summary, the red team exists to Attack, Blue team is there to defend, while purple team is optional, and their job is to support the communication process between red and blue teams.

Conclusion

In the end, I would like to mention that cyber security needs skills and experience, the only way to improve yourself is by practicing. Remember in the second point? I explained about VMs, set up a VM and try to practice inside it, so you don’t affect your system. Hope this video was informative for you, if you have any questions feel free to write them in the comments section, don’t forget to subscribe and turn the notification on for more content,

Thanks for reading and catch you in the next article.

This article is written by Fady Azzi