Preface

As a cybersecurity trainer, I've realized it's rare to find books that focus on cybersecurity operations for students and IT professionals who want to pursue a career in cybersecurity operations, incident response, and Blue Teaming strategies. Having the opportunity to write this book allowed me to share my knowledge, insights, and wisdom with others while helping to fill the gap between the offensive and defensive sides of cybersecurity.

When I gained my Cisco Certified CyberOps Associate certification, I fully understood the need and importance of such skills and knowledge for any professional within the cybersecurity industry. Therefore, I was inspired to give back to the community to help others learn and become better within their profession while improving their skills.

Using experience, research, and discussions with like-minded professionals within the industry, I was able to not only create the core content for the certification curriculum but also provided a beyond-certification approach through various chapters. This will allow you to obtain more in-depth information and strategies on key topics with hands-on labs to become an awesome cybersecurity professional.

As you embark on this new journey in the field of cybersecurity, I can definitely say it is going to be very exciting and thrilling as you will learn about the core operations of a cybersecurity professional.

The Cisco Certified CyberOps Associate certification is designed to provide you with all the essential skills and knowledge for the cybersecurity landscape of the world tomorrow. The certification is focused on ensuring the learner is well equipped to start a career in cybersecurity operations.

Furthermore, you will start by learning the fundamentals of networking and security concepts as they are important for cybersecurity professionals to have a solid foundation of how network protocols and security technologies function, and the role they play in enterprise networks.

You'll then take a deep dive in later sections of this book, which will cover how to perform security monitoring. You'll learn how to identify threats and various types of cyber-attacks. Then, you'll explore the need to perform both host-based and network-based analysis to detect and prevent intrusions on systems and networks.

Lastly, as an aspiring cybersecurity professional you will also learn about various incident response standards, strategies, and procedures that are used to prevent and recover from security events and intrusions.