Cybersecurity Fundamentals

>> (Music) Hello and welcome. My name is Anthony Sequera. I'm one of the edutainers here at ACI Learning, and I am going to be one of your two hosts in this Cybersecurity Essentials course. You'll also see our own Daniel Lowry hosting some of these episodes, but I've got great news for you. We have someone leading these episodes, and you are going to love her instruction. It's our own Sophie Goodwin. >> Sophie, welcome. You really built up that introduction. I'm nervous now. I feel like I'm getting sweaty. Yes. I know you've been working on this for quite some time, this Cybersecurity Essentials course, which actually maps to a certification exam, but I'm getting way ahead of ourselves here. >> Let's begin by just having Sophie tell us a bit about herself. Well, as you said, >> I am a host here and now an edutainer stepping into the world of Smeeing, so this has been fun. I really enjoy putting together this course, and I hope you enjoy it as well. But I am certified in cybersecurity through ISC2, and so that is going to be the certification that if you are planning on taking that cert, this would be the course to watch. A lot of these objectives are going to be mapped to that exam, but even if you're not, this is just going to be a fun introduction to some of those cybersecurity essentials that you might want to know if you're just getting into cyber, and that's kind of where I am. I've been doing this a couple of years here at ACI Learning. I've been hosting a lot of cybersecurity courses and now looking forward to teaching it as well. So that's cool. So there is an exam that someone could take after these episodes and you're preparing them to pass that, but from what I hear, it's a great introduction to cybersecurity, even if you're not interested in taking that certification exam. All right, Sophie, I'm going to put you on the spot here. Did you pass on your first try when you took this exam? I did pass on my first. Nice. Excellent. I'm generally an okay test taker. I'm not always the brightest as far as like, you know, I can't do quantum physics or anything, but give me an exam and I can do okay. So I did pass and it wasn't terribly as stressful as it could have been. It's multiple choice. It's not a lot of like there's no written answers or anything like that. So it wasn't as daunting as I thought it would be. Did you have plenty of time when you were taking the test? Because I know with some of these exams, like particularly the CompTIA type, their time can be a real pressure. Did you feel like there was intense time pressure on this one? I going into it, I was nervous. I did. I was able to finish with a good amount of time left. You have about two hours. You've about two hours, exactly two hours. And it's a hundred questions, but they're all multiple choice. And if you if you do learn the material and study, a lot of it is going to be when you look at that question, it should be it should jump out at you. The answer should jump out at you. So as long as you manage your time and know going into it, I've got these hundred multiple choice questions. I don't want to spend any longer than a minute or two on each question. Then you should be able to get it done in plenty of time. So this is titled cybersecurity essentials. >> And I was curious. So for you, you have such an extensive background with cybersecurity as the host of our weekly Technado show, which focuses on cybersecurity. But I was just curious as far as these essentials topics go. Did you have some areas that were your favorites as you were preparing the episodes? I definitely had areas that were a little more fun and engaging to put together. Some of this stuff is going to be stuff that's important to know. And we did try to make it so that it was engaging and still interesting to to participate in and to learn about. But things like regulations and laws, a lot of times that stuff can come across pretty dry. But even at a basic level, it's important to have an understanding of that kind of stuff. So I did actually have some fun putting those episodes together, if only because it was like, how do I make this engaging? How do I make this so that it keeps people focused, but it's also going to be something that you can learn from the episodes that turned out better than I thought they would. But we're a little bit more challenging. We're like the episodes on encryption and hashing because it sounds like it can be complicated. And if you get too far into the weeds on it, it can be complicated. But at a at an essential introductory level, it's not too terribly hard to understand. And I tried to make it what's the word digestible, I guess. Yeah, sure. That's great. Well, I understand that you wanted to actually show us some more information about the exam that you are preparing us for with this course. >> Yeah, absolutely. So if you go to the ISC2 website, they will have all of their exams and certifications listed there. This one is the certified in cybersecurity certification. That is a mouthful. This is available in a handful of different languages. So that's pretty cool. But it's got the list of topics that are covered on this exam. So these are the topics that we'll cover in this course. Security principles, incident response, network security, the whole shebang. But for each of these, we're going to keep it pretty introductory, pretty basic, only because we're not getting too far into the weeds on any of this. This is meant to be an entry level certification. This is meant to be something that whether you're already in the world of IT and you're looking to break into cybersecurity, or whether you're new to IT and cybersecurity in general, this is something that having a background in it isn't going to hurt you at all. But if you don't have a background in it, don't be scared. It's still going to be a fun course and it should still be digestible and pretty easy to follow and learn from. So these are the different domains that this exam covers. And we have some information on the exam as well. It's two hour exam, 100 questions, multiple choice. Passing grade is 700 out of 1000 points. Somebody who has taken the exam when they tell you if you passed or failed, I don't believe they tell you what score you got. I think if you didn't pass, they'll tell you, you know, hey, this is where you were at and this is what you needed to pass. But all I got was a piece of paper that said, hey, you passed. And that was it. And I was a little bummed. I wanted to know how I did. But I had to take this at just a local testing center. So it was like a couple hours away from where I live. I was visiting family. I just scheduled it ahead of time and went and took it there. And it was pretty quick and easy. Very quiet, though, kind of eerie going in there. It also tells you what the what the weight of each of these sections is. So you can see it's a little bit of a heavier weight on the security principles, which makes sense because it's going to be the foundation that a lot of this stuff is built on. Not as heavy of a weight on concepts like business continuity or disaster recovery, but still important. Access controls and network security account for about a quarter of them, a quarter of the exam and security operations coming in at the end for that total of 100 percent of the exam. So just some information on kind of what's in the exam. And we have domains on each of these topics on network security, things like on prem and cloud service, security operations, data handling and best practices, best security policies to be following security awareness training. We're going to try to do it all, but keep it at a very entry level. Awesome. Well, I am excited and I'm sure you are as well to dive into cybersecurity essentials with Sophie Goodwin. So >> get ready. Get a notepad and a pen. You're probably going to want to take some great notes and Sophie's prepared wonderful notes for us that we can download as well. So with no further ado, let's get started in cybersecurity essentials here at ACI Learning.