Observations of Instructor Led Training with Real Hardware

TechNow has heard many students talk about virtualized/remote training that TechNow Does Not Do. While training our most recent offering of PA-215: Palo Alto Networks Firewall Essentials FastTrack a student told his story of how he endend up in our course. His story we have heard for other technologies like Cisco, VMware, BlueCoat and other products.

A large percentage of training is moving to the virtualized/remote lab environments. Students are asked to use some variant of remote access software and remote into the training company's lab environment. Our student in our Palo Alto Networks Firewall course informed us that he went to a very costly offering of that course from the vendor and was not able to perform any labs. There were either network connectivity issues, or issues with the remote access software, or other problems. The whole training experience was very frustrating and not productive.

We keep our labs open to students if they would like after hours, or before hours access. Repeatedly going through a lab engrains that knowledge for later recall. Touching hardware is so critical in understanding the problems that arise when a cable comes loose, or a cable gets plugged in the wrong port. There are other scenarios such as just pulling the power cable, or turning off a power strip, or accidently overwriting a configuration. These disaster scenarious requires hands-on physical access to hardware. Preventing and recovering from disasters is what it's all about, and that requires hands-on, instructor led, real hardware.

TN-855: Advanced and In-Depth ICD 503 RMF, Controls, and Assessments

Course Overview:

This course is very hands-on with respect to SP 800-53 controls as related to ICD-503, leveraging experience with DCD 6/3, and incorporating a broad array of technologies found in the field. Assessors and Auditors have to face many technologies that are not part of the main stream. TechNow has gone to great efforts to build a very broad, comprehensive, and complex lab to simulate many scenarios and architectures. Technologies such as a network appliance that is not a typical infrastructure product, a radio/satellite communications device, or many other technologies that build up a weapon system. Students learn how controls are integrated into many different devices and how they fit in the overall security architecture of monitoring, reporting, and compliance testing.

Directly discussed are overlays for different requirements i.e.: tactical, medical, network type: JWICS, SIPR; IC or AF. TechNow has developed a funnel concept to overlays to exemplify the encapsulation of a control within different requirements. TechNow has over 15 years experience in Trusted Solaris/Trusted Extensions and labeled security. Cross Domain overlays are presented that fits the work flow of an assesor. PII overlays and any overlays that an organization uses and can be made available are also presented.

This course allows the student to leverage years of experience in DoD DCD 6/34 for transition to the Risk Management Framework (RMF) applied to the Intelligence Community as mandated by ICD 503. Utilizing NIST SP 800-37 to establish a baseline of RMF knowledge, the student learns how to integrate the NIST pubs to provide cohesive information assurance architectures and compliance. ICD 503 scorecard evaluations are integral in demonstrating a successful ICD 503 compliance program. TechNow's ICD 503 course provides students with the skill to assess security programs and evaluate ICD 503 compliance to build an improvement and sustainable program for score consistency. TechNow's instructors have unparralleled expertise in federal compliance initiatives, and we bring this expertise instructing students on the complete life cycle of RMF.

More than a simple checklist, we instruct students not only how to validate essential security controls, programs, and metrics, but that they are operating effectively. The student leaves the course knowing how to: identify gaps where controls, programs, or metrics are incomplete, missing or ineffective, and provide actionable findings and recommend remediation strategies. Students learn to internalize NIST pubs to meaningul and effective IA guidelines and work with the Body of Evidence templates which include: Risk Assessment Report (RAR), Systems Security Plan (SSP), Security Assessment Report (SAR), and Plans of Action and Milestone (POAM).

TechNow training materials are aligned with the most recent set of National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), Committee on National Security Systems (CNSS), and Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) policies standards, processes, policies and instructions to be addressed/explained include ICD 503, ICS 503-1, ICS 500-16, ICS 500-18, ICS 500-27, ICD 502, NIST SP 800-37, NIST SP 800-30, NIST SP 800-53, NIST SP 800-53A, NIST SP 800-137, NIST SP 800-47, CNSSP 22, CNSSI 1253, and CNSSI 4009.

A majority of time is spent on in-depth compliance review of NIST SP 800-53 controls. Instruction discusses which method should be used to test and validate each security control and what evidence should be gathered. This course is not theory or death by power point. Real scenarios are presented as exercises. A complete live cyber range simulating the IC is utilized for hands-on labs for techniques of validating and documenting compliance of NIST SP 800-53 controls as related to ICD 503.

Date/Locations:

No Events

Duration: 5 days

Course Objectives:

Establish a baseline of RMF knowledge
Validate essential security controls, programs, and metrics
DoD DCD 6/3 to ICD 503 Transition
Lab Environtment and the Cyber Range
Overlays: Tactical, Medical, Network type(JWICS, SIPR; IC or AF), Cross Domain, PII
Risk Assessment Report (RAR)
Systems Security Plan (SSP)
Security Assessment Report (SAR)
Plans of Action and Milestone (POAM)

Prerequisites:

Experience in the field of auditing and assesments.

Comments

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L-395: Accelerated Linux Administration and Utilities

Course Overview:

This course is extremely fast paced and for students that have already had UNIX or Linux training, or have not worked with Linux in several months or years. This is NOT a course for students new to Linux and assumes the student requires a refresher before progressing through high end security courses that require dexterity on Linux. RedHat and Ubuntu, VMware Virtual Machines, and BackTrack are used for the instruction of this course. The student will acquire the skills to easily navigate the advanced VMware training environment and will be able to create scripts to manipulate and manage Linux. The ulimate goals of the skills of this course is to provide the student the ability to automate through scripting BackTrack tools for offensive security, forensics, and defense.

Attendees to L-395: Accelerated Linux Administration and Utilities will receive TechNow approved course materials and expert instruction.

Date/Locations:

No Events

Duration: 5 days

Course Objectives:

Day 1 and 2: Unix Review and Unix Utilities

Linux File System Archictecure and In-Depth discussion of Hard and Soft Links
Linux File, Directory, and Permissions Management
Linux archives using tar and zip
Interacting with BASH
Review of Common Linux commands
Sorting files by line or field
Regular Expressions (meta character) with grep commands to locate specific lines in files
Grep, egrep extended metacharacters, combinations-lab advanced combinations- lab Sed
Basic commands- Lab, Advanced commands- Lab, Advanced scripting -Lab
Miscellaneous commands Tr, sort, cut, past, pr -Lab
Performing non-interactive editing tasks with the sed command
Writing simple sed scripts to perform complex editing tasks
Using awk variables & arrays to sort data
Employing awk programs to manipulate numeric & textual data
Performing formatted printing in awk
Writing simple awk programs to write reports from data files
Using built-in awk functions & defining new functions
Write awk programs that make decisions based on numeric or string comparisons (branches & loops)

Day 3 – Intro to Programming / Shell Scripting

Shell Review
Shell Interpretation of Quotes & Backslash
The Bash Shell
Shell's combined with UNIX utilities
Programming Basics
Data Constructs
Programming Looping
Your Environment
More on Parameters

Day 4 and 5 – Security Fundamentals, Linux Administration

System Configuration / Kernel overview
System Maintenance / Disk and file admin
Using utilities for process control, locating files & automating maintenance tasks
System Startup / Boot Process – LILO & GRUB Configuration
Managing the Linux file system
Customization of setup files
Run Levels
Network Services / Configuration
User Management Monitoring, accessing & restricting root system access
Administration Tools
Process Control
Client side components of NFS, Samba, NTP, NIS
Server side components such as DHCP, Samba, NIS, LDAP, inet, telnet, ftp, DNS, etc.

Prerequisites:

Prior UNIX/Linux experience or training

Comments

Latest comments from students

User: mikenaya

Instructor comments: As usual, Dave was excellent and the content was very relevant to our line of work.

Facilities comments: The hotel facilities met our basic needs but it was awkward having a bathroom so close. I can't wait for the new facility to open.

User: fquinene

Instructor comments: Instructor was super knowledgeable and helped me tie in a lot of information from other OS and processes.

Facilities comments: Facility was fine

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TN-969: Windows Security Administrator Course

Course Overview:

A skills focus enables the student to better absorb the subject matter and perform successfully on the job. This is not death by power point. The course is aligned with information assurance operators and executing hands-on labs to secure Windows systems. Lecture and labs start with quick review of Active Directory and group policy to enforce security mechanisms within the Windows architecture. Students then gain network experience and use sniffing to help exemplify the benefit of learning wired and wireless security configurations. PowerShell is made for SecOps/DevOps automation and students will learn to write PowerShell scripts to automate security operations and Desired State Configuration (DSC). The course concludes with exercising real attack strategies to demonstrate the effectives of properly securing your host.

Attendees to TN-969: Windows Security Administrator course will receive TechNow approved course materials and expert instruction.

Date/Locations:

No Events

Duration: 5 days

Course Objectives:

Active Directory and BloodHound
Security Controls
PKI
Encryption
Wireless & Network Security and Hardening DNS
802.1x and Endpoint Protection
Firewalls and VPN
PowerShell Scripting
JEA, DSC, Enterprise Security with PowerShell
Windows Attack Strategies

Prerequisites:

Security+
Windows System Administration Skills

Comments

Latest comments from students

User: bbrabender

Instructor comments: Instructor was very knowledgeable and help more inexperienced users with concepts as well explaining in a way that can be understood.

Facilities comments: N/A

User: dale.r.anderson

Instructor comments: Instructor was well knowlegeable accross alot of domains.

Facilities comments: Pretty good

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