Re: New to the security field

From: Keith W. McCammon (km@km.com)
Date: 03/31/03 

From: "Keith W. McCammon" <km@km.com>
Date: Mon, 31 Mar 2003 09:10:53 -0500

> Good day all,
> I am in the process of entering the security field. I am
> currently desktop support specialist. Where should I
> start, what test should I take?

1) Learn every thing that you can about the IP protocols. Read TCP/IP
Illustrated, The Protocols (Stevens) from front to back. This should keep
you busy for several months at the very least. Without expert-level
knowledge of IP, you'll be eaten alive (mostly by other security folks :).

2) Learn some of the principles of network attack and countermeasures.
Building Internet Firewalls (Zwicky) is a good place to start, as is Network
Intrusion Detection (Northcutt). There are a number of "hacking" how-to
books that you can burn a few hours with as well, although most of them are
garbage.

3) Crypto. Applied Cryptography (Schneier?) is a good place to start. It
may cause you some considerable headache, but it's worthwhile to read and
understand.

In general, folks have a pretty hard time deciding to "enter" the security
field. More often than not, folks just kind of lateral in that direction
from high-level systems/network engineering positions. If you want to get
into a security-related position and be any good at it, work your way up to
a challenging senior-level network engineering position--most of these
include a considerable amount of security work to begin with--then start
looking for more specific work.

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