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.

Palo Alto Networks Firewall Training Course Lab

Working with the TechNow lab for the PA-215: Palo Alto Networks Firewall Essentials FastTrack course has been nothing less than a techie's idea of fun.  When students come in we are immediatly configuring the Cisco 3750 switches for access ports, VLANS, and trunks.  We then cable the switch to the Palo Alto Networks Firewall.  Each student gets their own Palo Alto Firewall Pod of hardware and software.  What we find as fun is the VLAN environment, with an array of virtual machines hosted on an ESXi server that can really exercise the abilities of the Palo Alto Firewall.  The DMZ VLAN hosts virtual machines that support enterprise services and also potentialy vulnerable web services.  The Trust VLAN has Windows and Linux clients.  The UnTrust VLAN has Web services and a VM of Kali. The hardware Firewall is additionally connected to a Management VLAN.  All those VLANs are trunked into an ESXi server where the student also has a VM-Series Palo Alto Networks Firewall for High Availability.  

After configuring all the trunking, VLANs, and network interfaces we learn about the firewall and configure it for the lab environment.  Using Metasploitable and Kali/Metasploit nefarious penetration attempts are executed.  Using packet captures, custom APP-ID's  and custom signatures are generated.  Custom logging and reporting are created to similate and enterprise and assist the desired Incident Response.  It is always fun in a training environment to learn all about the controls available in a product, even though specific controls may not be used in the operational environment.  In the end we have a good understanding of the Palo Alto Networks Firewall.

CT-395: CySA+ Cybersecurity Analyst

 

Course Overview:

CT-395: CompTIA CySA+ Cybersecurity Analyst is for IT professionals looking to gain IT security analyst skills, and for those following the recommended skills pathway to achieve cybersecurity mastery. It provides a bridge between CompTIA Security+ (CT-325) and CompTIA Advanced Security Practitioner (CASP,CT-425), thus completing a certification path within the CompTIA family of certifications. As attackers have learned to evade traditional signature-based solutions, an analytics-based approach has become extremely important. CySA+ applies behavioral analytics to the IT security market to improve the overall state of security. The CompTIA Cybersecurity Analyst (CySA+) certification verifies that successful candidates have the knowledge and skills required to configure and use threat detection tools, perform data analysis and interpret the results to identify vulnerabilities, threats and risks to an organization, with the end goal of securing and protecting applications and systems within an organization. Let us help you bridge this gap, and leave you prepared for the certification exam (CS0-002).

TechNow is a CompTIA partner uses official CompTIA CySA+ curriculum.

Dates/Locations:

Date/Time Event
12/02/2024 - 12/06/2024
08:00 -16:00 		CT-395: CYSA+
TechNow, Inc, San Antonio TX

Duration: 5 Days

Course Objectives:

  • Threat Management
  • Vulnerability Management
  • Cyber Incident Response
  • Security Architecture and Tool Sets

Prerequisites: 

While there is no required prerequisite, the CompTIA CySA+ certification is intended to follow CT-325: Security+ or equivalent experience.  It is recommended for CompTIA CySA+ candidates to have the following:

  • 3-4 years of hands-on information security or related experience
  • Network+, Security+, or equivalent knowledge.

Comments

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TN-959: UNIX Security Administrator Course

Course Overview:

The  UNIX Security Administrator Prep is a hands-on course that covers how to secure and audit UNIX and Linux operating systems. This includes concepts such as Rootkits, Buffer overflows, and monitoring UNIX/Linux systems.

Attendees to TN-959: Unix Security Administratorwill receive TechNow approved course materials and expert instruction.

Date/Locations:

No Events

Duration: 5 days

Course Objectives:

  • AIDE
  • Apache
  • Best Practices for Kernel Tuning and Warning Banners
  • Boot Services
  • Chroot()
  • DNS- BIND
  • DNSSec
  • Evidence Collection and Preservation
  • Forensic Analysis
  • Forensic Preparation and Incident Handling
  • Host Based Firewalls – iptables
  • Intro to Forensics
  • OS Install and Patching
  • Physical, User Account, and Password Access Control
  • Se Linux
  • Sendmail
  • SSH
  • Stack Smashing
  • Sudo
  • Syslog-NG
  • UNIX Logging

Course Prerequisites:

  • GSEC or equivalent experience
  • UNIX, Windows, networking, and security experience
  • This is a hands-on skill course requiring comfort with command line interaction and network communications

 

Comments

Latest comments from students

User: wbcarter

Instructor comments: Good Stuff. Thanks!

User: ryuhas

Instructor comments: Very Good Instructor

Facilities comments: Facilities was great. Location had a lot to be desired. To much traffic and accidents trying to get here.

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CL-425: AWS Security Operations and Architecture

Course Overview:

This course begins by introducing you to fundamental cloud computing and AWS security concepts including AWS access control and management, governance, logging, and encryption methods. It also covers security-related compliance protocols and risk management strategies, as well as procedures related to auditing your AWS security infrastructure.

The course continues to teach students how to efficiently use AWS security services to stay secure and compliant in the AWS cloud. The course focuses on the AWS-recommended security best practices that you can implement to enhance the security of your data and systems in the cloud. The course highlights the security features of AWS key services including compute, storage, networking, and database services. This course also refers to the common security control objectives and regulatory compliance standards and examines use cases for running regulated workloads on AWS across different verticals, globally. You will also learn how to leverage AWS services and tools for automation and continuous monitoring—taking your security operations to the next level.

Attendees to CL-425: AWS Security Operations and Architecture will receive TechNow approved course materials and expert instruction.

Duration: 5 Days

Audience:
• Security engineers
• Security architects
• Security analysts
• Security auditors
• Individuals who are responsible for governing, auditing, and testing an organization’s IT infrastructure, and ensuring conformity of the infrastructure to security, risk, and compliance guidelines

DoD 8140: Not Mandated

Course Prerequisites:

We recommend that attendees of this course have the following prerequisites:
This course assumes you have the equivalent experience or have taken the AWS operational courses that are in the TechNow AWS track.
• CL-415: AWS Security Operations

The above courses encapsulate prerequisite knowledge:
• Experience with governance, risk, and compliance regulations and control objectives
• Working knowledge of IT security practices
• Working knowledge of IT infrastructure concepts
• Familiarity with cloud computing concepts

Course Objectives:

This course teaches you how to:
• Identify the security and compliance benefits of using the AWS cloud.
• Discuss the AWS Shared Responsibility Model.
• Describe the access control and access management features of AWS.
• Use AWS services for security logging and monitoring.
• Describe data encryption methods to secure sensitive data.
• Describe AWS services used to protect network security.
• Describe the basic steps to ensure strong governance of your AWS resources.
• Identify AWS services used to maintain governance of control environments.
• Use the AWS audit features.
• Explain how to audit an AWS environment.
• Explain the AWS compliance and assurance programs.
• Describe how AWS audits and attestations validate that security controls are implemented and operating effectively.
• Assimilate and leverage the AWS shared security responsibility model.
• Mange user identity and access management in the AWS cloud.
• Use AWS security services such as AWS Identity and Access Management, Amazon Virtual Private Cloud, AWS Config, AWS CloudTrail, AWS Key Management Service, AWS CloudHSM, and AWS Trusted Advisor.
• Implement better security controls for your resources in the AWS cloud.
• Manage and audit your AWS resources from a security perspective.
• Monitor and log access and usage of AWS compute, storage, networking, and database services.
• Analyze events by capturing, monitoring, processing, and analyzing logs.
• Identify AWS services and tools to help automate, monitor, and manage security operations on AWS.
• Perform security incident management in the AWS cloud.
• Perform security assessments to ensure that common vulnerabilities are patched and security best practices are applied. The assessment outline deals both with AWS specifics and also lays down the workflow of NIST, FedRAMP, and Cloud Security Alliance STAR compliance for a deployed AWS solution.

Dates/Locations: No Events

Course Outline:

Day 1
• Introduction to Cloud Computing and AWS Security
• Access Control and Management
• AWS Security: Governance, Logging, and Encryption
• Compliance and Risk Management

Day 2
• Introduction to Cloud Security Course Objectives
• Security of the AWS Cloud: Entry Points, Web Application, Communications, and Incident Response.
• Cloud Aware Governance and Compliance and related control frameworks.
• Identity and Access Management
Day 3
• Securing AWS Infrastructure Services
• Securing AWS Container Services
• Securing AWS Abstracted Services
• Using AWS Security Services
Day 4
• Data Protection in the AWS Cloud
• Managing security in a hybrid environment
• Deep dive into AWS monitoring and log analysis
• Protecting against outside threats to AWS VPC
Day 5
• How to carry out a Pentest on an AWS solution
• Security Incident Management and Automating security and incident response
• Threat detection and monitoring sensitive data
• Lets Do it! Building Compliant Workloads on AWS—Case Study