1-Man IT Department

Security Bootcamp - Day 3

Well, what can I say about today. At the end of it, we will be halfway through our course books. Today was a lot of fun for me. We talked about a lot of stuff that I did not know anything about. So let’s just jump into it.

Day 3 - Internet Security Technologies

Security Essentials - Day 2 Defense-In-Depth

Well, another day, another 500+ book to go through in Security Training.

Today was Defense-In-Depth day at Security Essentials Bootcamp. I really enjoyed today a lot. We finished the fundamental stuff yesterday and started hitting the ground cracking (literally).

We started with a discussion of what Defense-In-Depth entailed. We hit on multiple layers of protection, the CIA Triad, risk management and the differences between threat and vulnerabilities. Then we began a rather lengthy talk about the differences between viruses, worms and trojans, and hit on some of the big hitters from years past…Melissa, Sasser, Slammer…ahhh, the good ole days. After a brief overview of malware and it effects, we moved on to the next section.

SANS Security Essentials Bootcamp Day 1

I am spending this week traveling to Birmingham, Alabama to attend the SANS Community Event that is teaching SEC401 - Security Essentials Bootcamp. The class is me and 23 others from all over the country. Most are from Alabama, but there are some from my home state of Louisiana (Louisiana Lottery Corp.) a couple from Georgia (including one gent who had to wear his University of Georgia Coachs shirt today, argh!), and then individuals from Arkansas, North and South Carolina, Florida, and Tennessee. The class is being taught by Matt Pierce who is the Security Administrator at AdTran in Huntsville, AL.

When we each arrive at the hotel, we are greeted with a black zippered bag with the SANS logo on it. When I lifted mine up, I thought that I had thrown my back out again. I looked down and saw 6 books that are each at least 2″ thick in them. Upon closer inspection, there was one book for each day, and they are each at least 500 pages. WOW! That is over 3000 pages of documentation for this training course.

My State of the Network

I have decided to lay out some of the basics of my network at my job. Read forth with caution because it is not pretty. Please leave and and all suggestions that you have for me to make my network better and especially more secure. I have a Grand Vision in my head of what I want the network to be like. Now it is just getting the money, time and knowledge to get it all in place.

I have been at my job since Jan 2006. It is the first network administration job that I have had. I have come from the desktop support arena that dabbled in the network area. When I got here, our entire City Hall network was running on an old Compaq Proliant ML350 with 40GB hard drive. It had Novell 5.1 as the NOS, Groupwise 6.5 for email for 85+ users, Symantec Anti-Virus Corporate 8, ARCserve 6 for our single tape backup and the file server for 30+ users. The backup had not for the 2+ months prior to my arrival, which was revealed when our Sales Tax database got corrupted before my arrival [who would have thought a 300+MB Access database would corrupt!].

Hello world!

This blog is a brand new venture for me. It will complement my other blogs: Black Belt Productivity, a blog I co-author about Getting Things Done, The Art of Stress-Free Productivity, and Rammblings, my personal blog.

This will be my blog that deals with my life in Information Technology. I am now the Network Administrator for the City of Northport, a small municipality in Central Alabama. I am also beginning to realize that my IT passion lies in Information Security (InfoSec).

Currently, I am pursuing a number of certifications. I am going to get my CompTIA A+, Network+ and Security+ certifications in my initial stages.

I am a new MacBook Pro owner, as well as a long time Microsoft Windows user. My decision to get the Mac was made in part so that I could learn a lot more about Linux, as well as my noticing that a lot more Security Professionals are moving to the Mac OS X platform. I have moved my main desktop machine at home to Windows Vista. I do like it a lot, and I will be talking about more later.