Passed Security+

Passed with, according to me, flying colors, 865, October 20 last year.

I passed the Network+ certification in April and started to study for Security+ almost immediately, and found that there is indeed a lot of overlap between the two certifications.

I bought three books, actually four.
- Conklin
- Clarke Boxed set
- Gibson
- Gibson's Practice Test Questions.

The last book was never used, it seems it contains an excerpt of practice questions from Gibson's main book.

I started reading Conklin from cover to cover, no notes, but all practice questions.

After that I read Gibson while taking notes, and of course doing all practice questions.

At some stages I did a full practice exam, to see where my weak spots were.

Then I used the many practice exams and few chapters in Clarke to repeat the weak spots, just to read the same subject but from different point of view.

The last exam I did was Gibson's and I scored 89%. The day after I scored 96% on the actual exam.

Security, and especially IAM is actually my professional field since 10+ years, so I was not that surprised to pass the exam, but I did learn a lot anyways, and that was my main goal, to learn.

Soon I will start to study for the CISSP exam. But before that I am taking a few security related courses at coursera.org. I can recommend the cryptography course, it is very mathematical but gives you a deep understanding about why some crypto-systems are secure and why some are not.

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Comments

101010

Congrats on the pass.

Anders4711 wrote: »

I can recommend the cryptography course, it is very mathematical but gives you a deep understanding about why some crypto-systems are secure and why some are not.

Good to know, I just started the Cryptography 1 today. Looking forward to it.

fadhil

congrats on pass

Dakinggamer87

Congrats on pass!!

Darril

Congrats on the pass. Good luck with the CISSP.

bobloblaw

I think the Network+ and Security+ are great foundations to supplement the CISSP. I actually think the new Network+ is more in depth than the network and telco section of CISSP. I'm going to take the Security+ in a couple weeks to pad the resume, but skimming Darril's Security+ recently seems like a flashback to cryptography along with some solid basics of access control and security models.

Direct straightforward questions on the CISSP exam are few and far between. I can't stress this point enough (as does Darril in his intro in his Security+ book). You'll find solid in depth advice from everyone in the CISSP forum section. I swear that forum saved me from taking it more than once.

I've said this before, but I really wish I would have taken the Network+ and Security+ prior to the CISSP. Both would have made my life a whole lot easier.

Congrats and good luck.