Network Security 101 : Start Network Security from Scratch

Explore how information security protects confidentiality, integrity, and availability, and why continuous adaptation and strong security policies safeguard organizational objectives.

Define roles and responsibilities for information security across executives, security professionals, asset owners, custodians, users, and auditors. Show how they implement and enforce policies to protect confidentiality, integrity, and availability.

Improve your organization's security posture through information security governance that aligns security and business objectives, engages stakeholders, and standardizes policies, risk management, incident response, and awareness training.

Apply information security control frameworks to manage risks, control access, and respond to incidents, following guidelines from ISO 27,001 and popular frameworks like the Nice cybersecurity framework and Covid.

Explore information security laws, regulations, and compliance, including HIPAA, GDPR, and PCI DSS, and implement audits, risk assessments, and security controls to protect sensitive data and build trust.

Define an information security policy with standards, procedures, and guidelines to govern use, protection, access control, data classification, and data retention.

Master secure design principles to build systems secure by default, applying least privilege, defense in depth, fail safe devices, economy of mechanism, and open design.

Establish baselines and document configurations for all information systems to support security objectives. Monitor controls, access, and changes using tools to ensure confidentiality, integrity, and availability.

Learn how robust change management safeguards information security by identifying and documenting changes, assessing impact, testing, implementing, and monitoring to mitigate security breaches across IT, security, and business units.

Identify vulnerabilities across software, hardware, and systems and deploy patches to mitigate risks. Prioritize remediation by severity and exploitation likelihood, test patches in controlled environments, and monitor for ongoing vulnerabilities.

Define cyberspace as the expanding digital realm of computer networks, internet, and virtual reality, shaping privacy, security, digital rights, and the rise of AI, blockchain, and IoT.

Explore the evolving concept of cybersecurity, its multidimensional challenges, and how technology, policies, and disciplines work together to safeguard information and privacy across decades.

Identify cyber threats like phishing, social engineering, malware, DDoS, and data breaches, and learn defenses such as firewalls, encryption, strong passwords, and backups.

Explore cyber threat actors, including state-sponsored groups, criminals, activists, insiders, and advanced persistent threats, and understand their motivations, tactics like ransomware, and impacts on organizations.

Discover how blue, red, and purple teams defend networks, endpoints, and cloud security by simulating attacks, monitoring traffic, and strengthening incident response and security audits.

Discover how security operations centers detect, prevent, and respond to incidents using security information and event management, intrusion detection and prevention, threat hunting, while monitoring events and ensuring compliance.

Master penetration testing by simulating cyber attacks to identify vulnerabilities, choose black box or white box methods, and craft recommendations to improve security through reconnaissance, scanning, exploitation, and post exploitation.

Protect sensitive data by enforcing access control, employing passwords and encryption, and establishing data backup and recovery to counter hardware failure and cyber threats.

Learn cloud security through encryption, access control, and regular backups to protect data confidentiality, integrity, and availability. Stay ahead of threats by monitoring and updating security protocols.

Explore how computer networks interconnect devices with hubs, switches, and routers; learn IP and MAC addressing, the OSI seven-layer model, and essential protocols like TCP, DNS, HTTP, and SSL.

Analyze network traffic with Wireshark to observe protocol flows, including SSL handshakes, DNS lookups, FTP vs SFTP traffic, ICMP pings, and SMTP email, while exploring DHCP changes and ARP messages.

Defense in depth layers multiple defensive mechanisms to protect data, including firewalls and encryption, so if one layer fails, others detect, respond, and reduce breach impact.

Describe how a security operations center associate monitors, detects, investigates, and responds to cyber threats around the clock to protect assets using CRM, EDR, and an incident response plan.

Explore how firewalls defend networks by filtering packets, tracking connections, and isolating sensitive hosts. Learn how stateful inspection and DMZ configurations reduce exposure to external threats.

Install pfSense from a dvd iso, set up three network adapters (wan, lan, dmz), and configure firewall rules to block or allow traffic in a home lab.

Authorize internal users to access the internet and the dmz by firewall rules for http 80 and https 443, enable dns access to google.com, and demonstrate nat and port forwarding.

Explore how signature-based and anomaly-based intrusion detection identify suspicious network and host activity, using signatures and machine-learning baselines to trigger alerts and support inline intrusion prevention with whitelisting.

Learn to configure an IDS/IPS workflow with PEF Sense firewall and Snort, simulate directory traversal attacks against the DMZ password file, and use block mode to stop attackers.

Examine how a web application firewall sits between clients and web apps via a reverse proxy to monitor and block harmful HTTPS/HTTP traffic at the application layer, including SSL inspection.

Use Burp proxy with a browser to intercept HTTP requests, view login data in the proxy, and test directory traversal in the lab environment.

Configure P.F. Blocker Energy to filter inbound and outbound traffic using IP and URL blacklists, block ads and DNS-filtered sites, and apply social media and anonymous VPN lists in lab.

Explore unified threat management (UTMs) as a single security appliance centralizing antivirus, anti-spyware, anti-spam, firewall, URL filtering, IPS, content filtering, leak prevention, and VPN, with centralized management and cost savings.

Network access control blocks unauthorized devices and ensures external access meets regulations. It provides device visibility and quarantine remediation, while ACL-based firewalls enforce policies.

Honeypots are a controversial tool that detects, monitors, and sometimes tampers with attacker activities by displaying vulnerabilities to reveal origins, attacker techniques, and to reverse engineer security policies for protection.

Deploy a honeypot with pink box on Kali Linux, configure a fake website on port 80, and monitor attacker traffic using a linked clone setup.

IPsec secures IP traffic by encrypting and authenticating packets at the IP layer with ESP and AH, using IKE for key management and enabling VPNs via firewalls or routers.

Learn how VPN practices use OpenVPN to route traffic through a VPN server, encrypting data and masking the public IP despite NAT effects.

Explore wireless network security, focusing on access points, service set identifiers (ssid), and the evolution from WEP to WPA within 802.11 networks.

Explore iptables firewall basics by configuring policy chains, dropping all incoming traffic, and creating selective exceptions for ssh and http, then verify with port scans.

Discover network security career paths, from cybersecurity analysts who monitor activity and patch vulnerabilities to engineers who perform penetration testing and configure firewalls and intrusion detection.