Hello Defender!

Hope you all had some good holiday downtime and took a break from the studies. This will be a shorter newsletter with a couple updates and teasers. Larger one next Tuesday with some 2025 plans in depth!

Let’s get into it!

Table of Contents

• Brand

  • Level Effect on Simply Cyber Firesides - Jan 2nd!

  • Darkweb & APT Case Study Live Stream - Jan 10th!

  • DFIR

  • Something Big.

  • That’s a Wrap & Thank you! 🙏

Brand

Level Effect on Simply Cyber Firesides - Jan 2nd!

Mark your calendars for this Thursday, January 2nd at 4:30PM EST where one of our Co-Founders, Anthony Bendas will be speaking with Gerald Auger live! We’re really excited for this one and are big fans of what Simply Cyber team has provided for the community. Per the stream info:

“During this livestream, Anthony will share his insights on network security, cyber threat intelligence, vulnerability management, and pentesting. We will also learn about his journey, from conducting advanced penetration tests to designing security programs aligned with frameworks like NIST and PCI-DSS. Previously, Anthony demonstrated exemplary leadership skills in the hospitality industry at Fairmont Hotels & Resorts, laying the foundation for his approach to cybersecurity.”

Bookmark the YouTube link here! https://youtube.com/live/d1S3KUDOPIE

Darkweb & APT Case Study Live Stream - Jan 10th!

Hosted by Doug Kaluhiokalani, one of our SOC100 Instructors you’ve met and founder of CyberKata!

In Doug’s words:

“This will be a brief introduction into how to access and use the Tor browser for darkweb navigation. I will be starting off by telling the students to use this on a dummy machine and not your main or work computer. Download a VPN NordVPN has some protection on the free level. Then also go into what is Tor browser, how it was created, why it is used, and why are we using it in a SOC100 course. Where to download it and then doing a live demo of what it looks like accessing the browser and then showing them a certain darkweb hacker forum (a vanilla / mild one) like nulled.to or an .onion site.

Then showing them some of the services for sale making sure it is nothing explicit or graphic (like drugs, etc). Then going into how I use these sites to troll hackers and keep a pulse on the blackhat community or malicious actors to see what techniques and tools they are using to steal creds, money, atm cards, etc. Then using that information to create a runbook/playbook of how to defend against that attack and sandboxing it to see if it works.”

We’ll have an invite link and time ready for next week!

DE&TH

January 14th! DE&TH: Windows content! Existing course content is being revamped to integrate a new detection discord bot-driven workflow, replacing current ticket-based support, while also paving the way for future expansions like DE200 focusing on cloud and SaaS topics.

We’ll have more updates on next week’s newsletter detailing what to expect more in depth!

DFIR

We’ve mentioned this a few times now but just wanted to make this even more official. 2025 will see Level Effect start delivering on the SOC200+ level of content and we’re going to open up the DFIR category.

Consider this to be “CDA2” level material focusing on endpoint incident response and forensics specifically, and we can’t wait to share the news on who a new Instructor is that will be helming it.

Something Big.

Okay this is just a cryptic teaser here…

We’ve been planning something behind the scenes the last month or two.

It’s something we’ve wanted to do for a long time and will be a very collaborative event.

It’s going to happen in 2025.

There will be plenty of notice to attend it.

I’ve said too much. Stay tuned for early 2025 updates on this.

That’s a Wrap & Thank you! 🙏

From all of us over at Level Effect we are wishing you a happy new year! We’ll see you again this Thursday on the Simply Cyber stream and then back to SOC100 streams with more content after to come, and a big thank you to all of our community members and for those sticking with us through the year on a massive upgrade to our platform into the on-demand space. 💪

Get ready to Level Up even more in 2025 with us!