GSEC Masterclass – Build a Complete Cybersecurity Foundation

Explore how organizations separate information security from IT operations to strengthen governance, testing, and compliance, while information assurance coordinates risk, controls, and security posture for digital and physical assets.

Explore the CIA triad—confidentiality, integrity, and availability—and learn how security controls—technical, non-technical, and administrative—protect information from unauthorized access, disclosure, alteration, or destruction, ensuring authenticity and non-repudiation.

Explore core cybersecurity concepts such as threats, assets, vulnerabilities, and confidentiality, integrity, and availability, and learn how CVE identifiers and CVSS guide remediation.

Align information security with business strategy to protect confidentiality, integrity, and availability while enabling opportunities. Establish governance with policies, risk management, and incident response to safeguard customer data and compliance.

Explore how to balance security controls with cost using a structured risk management framework that identifies assets, analyzes risks, defines risk appetite, and aligns IT risk with business strategy.

Governance tools, including policies, standards, and procedures, set the organization's information security direction, reflect management intentions, define acceptable behavior, and require awareness training and periodic reviews.

Explore how standards and baselines support information security policies, with examples like password requirements and TLS upgrades. See how standards enable measurement, compliance, and timely updates across systems.

Explore how procedures translate standards into step-by-step actions and how guidelines offer best practices, while emphasizing document control, versioning, and regular reviews for governance and compliance.

Analyze information and communication technology risks facing the financial sector, including cyber attacks, data breaches, third-party risks, and implement multi-layered cybersecurity, data protection, regulatory compliance, and operational resilience.

Explore the foundations of computer networks, from Arpanet and tcp/ip origins to the roles of clients, servers, routers, switches, media, and nic, plus intranet, extranet, and internet contexts.

Explore the OSI and TCP/IP models, their seven and four-layer structures, and how encapsulation enables reliable, scalable network communications.

Explore mac and ip addresses, how arp maps them, and the risks of arp spoofing; learn mitigation through static arp entries, dynamic arp inspection, mac filtering, and IPv6 ndp.

Explore the transport layer, layer four, detailing segmentation, port-based application differentiation, and the TCP and UDP protocols that balance reliability and speed for end-to-end data delivery.

Explore secure network design for a small to medium organization, detailing LAN components, Active Directory, DNS, DHCP, and NTP. Emphasize VLANs, NAC, firewalls, endpoint protection, and least privilege.

Implement comprehensive firewall, router, and switch management policies with change control, MFA, logging, and audits, leveraging NGFW DPI to enforce application-based controls securing IT and OT networks.

Explore how DoS and DDoS attacks target availability across volume, protocol, and application layers, and examine mitigation via anti-DDoS platforms, WAFs, rate limiting, and redundancy.

Explore how a man-in-the-middle attack intercepts and potentially alters unencrypted network traffic via ARP spoofing and DNS poisoning, and learn practical mitigations like encryption, secure configurations, and NAC.

Explore how the domain name system translates domain names to IP addresses, from root and TLD servers to authoritative records, and study DNS security with DoH, DoT, and DNSSec.

Explore how cryptography protects data by transforming plaintext into ciphertext with symmetric and asymmetric encryption, ensuring confidentiality, integrity, and non-repudiation in data at rest and in transit.

Discover how symmetric encryption uses a single secret key for encryption and decryption, with aes, des, and 3des, and how key rotation and secure key management protect data.

Explore how asymmetric encryption uses public and private keys to secure data exchange, enabling secure key distribution, digital signatures, and non-repudiation in protocols like SSL and TLS.

Explore how hashing ensures data integrity and how digital signatures provide authenticity and non-repudiation, while contrasting hashing, encryption, and encoding within the CIA triad.

Explore how PKI enables secure communications through certificates issued by certificate authorities, with registration authorities validating identities and enrollment via CSR, and status checks through CRL or OCSP.

Explore how digital certificates establish trust and enable secure communication within public key infrastructure. Learn about X509 certificates, public and private keys, certificate authorities, and certificate signing requests.

Explore how SSL/TLS protocols secure online communications with digital certificates, the handshake, SSL pinning, and mutual TLS.

Explore FIPS 140-3's framework for cryptographic modules, covering hardware and software solutions, approved algorithms like AES and 3DS, and secure key management with self-tests and validation levels.

Operate a centralized security operations center that monitors, detects, analyzes, and responds to incidents using siem systems, intrusion detection systems, firewalls, and wafs to identify indicators of compromise.

Examine advanced persistent threats and their tactics, techniques, and procedures, including zero-day exploits, social engineering, backdoors, and long-term targeted espionage.

Discover how threat intelligence sources—from Osint and internal threat data to private platforms—drive alerts, vulnerability advisories, and incident response; CERTs coordinate, share intelligence, and support best practices.

Coordinate a multidisciplinary incident response team to prepare, identify, contain, eradicate, and recover from incidents, then learn and improve to protect assets and trust.

Develop an incident response plan (IRP) with senior management endorsement, clear scope, and documented contacts. Integrate problem management and testing, including blinded exercises, to enhance readiness and business continuity.

Learn how to collect and preserve security and forensic evidence during incident response, uphold the chain of custody with specialized tools like write blockers and bit-by-bit cloning to maintain integrity.

Learn how operational log management collects, monitors, analyzes, and stores audit trails from diverse systems to secure integrity, enable incident detection and investigation, and ensure regulatory compliance.

Learn how accounting and audit trails capture who did what, when, and on which resources through logs to detect unauthorized activity and support forensic investigations and incident response.

Explore SIEM architecture, including Splunk’s indexer, log collector, and universal forwarder, and how syslog, SNMP, NetFlow, and Sflow feed CM systems to enhance security posture and threat detection.

Explore the authentication, authorization, and accounting trilogy, including MFA, RBAC, OAuth, OpenID Connect, and passwordless approaches, to secure access, monitor activity, and enforce least privilege.

Explore multi-factor authentication (MFA) and biometrics, defense in depth to strengthen security via diverse factors: something you know, something you have, or something you are, while addressing usability and privacy.

Explore single sign on and reduced sign on mechanisms, their protocols such as saml and oauth, and mutual authentication with mtls, balancing convenience and security.

Explore identity and access management (IAM) and its four core components—authentication, user management, authorization, and a central repository—plus lifecycle, SSO, two-factor authentication, and RBAC/ABAC for secure, compliant access.

Explore privileged access management (PAM) to secure privileged accounts through least privilege, credential vaulting, session monitoring, MFA, and automated password management across on-premises and cloud environments.

Zero trust redefines security as a continuous verification framework with no assumed internal trust, applying least privilege and dynamic policy enforcement across data, apps, assets, and services.

Explore password attacks like dictionary, brute-force, credential stuffing, and password spraying, and apply countermeasures including multi-factor authentication, account lockout, salted hashing, and transport layer security.

Implement user account, password, and access control policies to manage account creation, two administrator accounts, role-based permissions, automatic lockouts, and secure password practices.