Information Security for Technical Staff

This five-day course is designed to provide participants with practical techniques for protecting the security of an organization's information assets and resources, beginning with concepts and proceeding on to technical implementations.

The course focuses on understanding and applying the concept of survivability through the effective management of risk, threats, policy, system configuration, availability, and personnel. The course also addresses incident response and provides a technical foundation for working with TCP/IP security and cryptography. The final section of the course helps participants learn to design a secure network architecture managing host systems, securing network services and infrastructure, working with firewalls, and understanding intrusion detection and prevention.

The principles, strategies, and practices covered are applicable to most system platforms and network environments. To illustrate important concepts and security technologies, demonstrations and exercises will include implementations applicable to Linux and Windows systems as well as Cisco Internetworking equipment.

The course involves extensive hands-on laboratories utilizing heterogeneous network environment, scenario-based exercises, lecture/briefings, and open discussion to help participants develop their understanding of the problems and strategies for securing information systems and networks.

Hands-on labs and demonstrations include subjects such as: Network scanning and enumeration; Packet capture and analysis, Windows Group Policy and Security templates; Network traffic encryption with IPSec; Intrusion detection and prevention with Snort; as well as information on personal and enterprise firewalls, password cracking, and extensive hacking/hardening of Linux, Windows, and Cisco platforms in both wireless and cabled networks. Each student will have the use of a laptop for the duration of the course, as well as access to a wide variety of networked systems. This course is part of the curriculum for the CERT-Certified Incident Handler Program.

Who should attend?

Technical staff members who manage or support networked information systems and have

• two years of practical experience with networked systems or equivalent training/education
• some degree of specific familiarity with the ISO/OSI 7-layered reference model as well as Ethernet, TCP/IP, and major network operating systems such as Windows NT/2000/XP and Unix

What will you learn?

This course will help participants to

• describe the components of survivability
• identify and define the components of an information security (IS) model
• describe the components of risk and asset management as applied to networked systems
• identify the benefits of invoking sound security policies and methods for implementing them
• describe the steps of the Security Knowledge in Practice(SKiP) methodology
• summarize key security concerns of the TCP/IP protocol suite
• describe the benefits of cryptography when applied to IS properties of confidentiality, integrity, and availability
• describe common methods of gathering information on networked systems
• describe the types of current vulnerabilities and threats to which an organization's information assets may be exposed
• identify common attack methods perpetrated against network systems
• describe best practices for hardening and actively defending host and networked systems from intrusions
• develop an approach for staying current with trends and requisite skills in information security