Wednesday, May 19, 2004

SecurityFocus HOME Infocus: TCP/IP Skills Required for Security Analysts

SecurityFocus HOME Infocus: TCP/IP Skills Required for Security Analysts

This article brings to point something that has bothered me off and on for awhile. You need the skills before you claim you can do it.

For several years now I have been interviewing network engineers. I have a standard that I have been following that involves a 15 page Excel spreadsheet that contains basic questions that most CCNAs should be able to answer. During the process of giving out this interview I have had various reactions - several gentlemen have left in tears - to having one engineer actually point out an error in my questions. He got hired immediately.

Interviewing has gotten tougher in our industry - before you put a resume out there make sure you understand everything you claim you know. You don't have to be able to recite the specific RFC details assocaited with MGCP.

I encourage young engineers to understand the OSI model, play around with the TCP stack, learn how things communicate, but don't forget to take the time to understand the architecture within your computer and it's relation to the OS's - Windows XP, Linux, FreeBSD.

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