Hello Defender!

Busy week with lots of updates and some new things to talk about including unique versions of our certs!

Let’s dive in!

Table of Contents

• 1. Brand

  • TLDR Cyber

  • Vanguard Certifications

    • CDCP Vanguard 1

    • Vanguard 10 and CDCP Gold

• 2. Content

  • DE&TH

  • SecOps Tabletop Stream - Jan 31, 1-3PM EST

  • AMA Digging into DFIR - Feb 7, 12-2PM EST

  • SOC100 Class 23 & 24

• 3. Community

  • FAQing Friday Forums

• 4. Tools

• 5. Takeaway This Week

1. Brand

TLDR Cyber

CDA Alumni and Senior RMS Administrator Jordan Westfall has been cooking! He’s putting together a “TLDR Cyber” service that collects and summarizes Cybersecurity articles, dumps them into a Discord forum, and allows a community to engage with the posts and talk about it. Sort of like getting together around a water cooler at or during break and discussing topics. We often get way too stuck in our own heads missing the human interaction behind what is a very human-centric field that utilizes technology.

Very cool tool that I personally saw in action and what’s more… he’s willing to come beta it in our Level Effect Discord ! 🙌

You should start seeing some posts appear now in a TLDR Cyber forum that you can react and respond to after he drops the new updates! Please give Jordan a shoutout for this project that should help expedite your knowledge consumption from articles but most importantly - provide you a space with fellow community members to talk about it all!

Here’s a screenshot below of it in action!

Vanguard Certifications

We’ve decided to make variants of our practical certifications to recognize exceptional talent. Being the first to achieve a certification without much prior guidance isn’t easy! These are similar to “first blood” style achievements in CTFs and we’re starting with the CDCP recognizing the first student to cap the cert.

CDCP Vanguard 1

The Vanguard 1 CDCP is a one-of-a-kind badge awarded only to the first student who completes the certification right after its release. With minimal public support or guidance available at that stage, earning this honor reflects exceptional skill and the ability to thrive in uncharted territory.

Check out the CDCP Vanguard 1 public badge here: https://badgr.com/public/badges/Yrrc-T4RS-iAUqWw2f0Odg

That award goes to Arkphyre in our Discord!

Vanguard 10 and CDCP Gold

We will also include a Vanguard 10 of the same sentiment of who can cap it first, and we’ll also see the same thing with our CDCP Gold variant as well.

2. Content

DE&TH

We need a little bit more time to roll out content to account for some delays and challenges on the Detector Bot end. We apologize for a little bit more of an extension here. For transparency sake a development team member needs to take a bit of a personal leave so we are shuffling around the task at hand. That means the course is still coming as planned but some timelines will need to be adjusted.

If you have more questions please hit up the DE-100 student channel to speak with the team there for more updates.

Please review what’s coming out today, and next week, and we’ll have some more definitive news on the bot end for next Tuesday and aren’t expecting anything more than a few to several weeks to get that end up and running at this time.

Updates coming up on DE&TH:

Today:

• Getting Started

• Detection Engineering

• Detection as Code

• Regular Expressions

• Snort Network Detection

• Yara File Detection

• Sigma Detection

Friday Jan 24th will be:

• Tuning and Optimization

• Threat Hunting

Monday Jan 27th will be:

• Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery

• Adversary Emulation

Also dropping a better description for you to have regarding the course itself:

SecOps Tabletop Stream - Jan 31, 1-3PM EST

This will be hosted by Fletus Poston! Fletus is a seasoned IT and security professional, with a career spanning since the mid-2000s when he began as an IDS handler. Throughout the years, he has managed cybersecurity initiatives in various industries, including finance, utility, and software development. Fletus holds a Master of Science in Information Systems (M.S.I.S.) specializing in Information Assurance, along with a range of certifications such as CISSP, SSAP, GISF, GSEC, GCED, GPCS, GMON, GCCC, GSLC, and GSOM. He takes great pleasure in sharing his expertise and passion for cybersecurity with others.

Current role: Sr. Manager, Security Operations & Application Security

Social media handles:

https://x.com/fletusposton 

https://www.linkedin.com/in/fletusposton

AMA Digging into DFIR - Feb 7, 12-2PM EST

Stay tuned for next week for an update on this one… but mark your calendars for it for now!

SOC100 Class 23 & 24

Finally got into the basics of Malware Analysis in Windows !

3. Community

We actually had a ton of activity going on in Discord this past week in the #home-lab channel and in general. There are too many screen caps to review to post so I’m just going to say to check those areas out the last week.

On that note, even more action happened below! 👇

FAQing Friday Forums

FAQing Friday is back in a new form with a weekly open AMA forum for anyone to ask any burning questions they’ve been having in this industry. This is going to be a weekly event every Friday where we lock the previous thread and then start a new one. This forum allows our Community Analysts and Instructors to assist and collaborate with you!

4. Tools

Bunch of great shares in the community this past week!

• https://www.splunk.com/en_us/training/free-courses/overview.html#splunk-security free Splunk training recommended by Dumaurier!

• https://drive.google.com/file/d/1PucaJJSXhwW7DEX6YeGaCX_xIXXAZcHR/view resume templates you might find helpful by Arielle!

• Calvin was cooking this week!

  • MITRE ATLAS Matrix shows tactics used in AI and ML attacks, with adaption from ATT&CK framework. https://atlas.mitre.org/matrices/ATLAS

  • MITRE released D3FEND™ 1.0, an ontology and knowledge base of vocabulary and concepts to help with cybersecurity countermeasures. https://d3fend.mitre.org/

  • Using chemistry concepts to help improve understanding of cybersecurity fundamentals. https://www.ukcybersecuritycouncil.org.uk/events/the-chemistry-of-cyber-security/

5. Takeaway This Week

See you next week!

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