Hello Defender!

We’re going to be giving away some CDA copies as the special launch rate ends end of this month… stay tuned. Lots of other great updates on this one too!

Let’s dive in!

Table of Contents

• 1. Brand

  • CDA Launch Rate Ends March 31st & Giveaway?

  • CDA Winter 2025 - Last Call

  • 🆕! Community Instructor - Fletus Poston

• 2. Content

  • Unlocking the Power of OSINT - March 7th, 1PM EST

  • Detection Engineering - March 8th, 12PM EST

  • SOC100 Class 31 Recording - Career Prep 3, Open So …

  • Our First YouTube Short! 🎥

• 3. Community

• 4. Tools

• 5. Takeaway This Week

1. Brand

CDA Launch Rate Ends March 31st & Giveaway?

The special launch rate of $499 ends this month and will go up to $799!

We’re looking into doing a giveaway send-off for it with more news to come next week on that.

I’ll say this much now - it’ll be merit-based and you’ll want to have completed SOC100-1 and the exam before we do any drawings.

CDA Winter 2025 - Last Call

Last chance to start with us next week for the CDA Live cohort. It’s not too late, and students have gotten started days before it for years.

I wrote some messages for students getting started with us right now that may be feeling a little intimidated or self-doubting (both normal!) below. I hope you find them helpful and insightful yourself for you readers that aren’t hanging out in Discord:

🆕! Community Instructor - Fletus Poston

We’re pleased to announce that Fletus Poston has become our first Community Instructor!

Community Instructor is a new thing here at Level Effect. These are instructors that will hang around Discord and be a mentoring and guiding voice for the community. These are volunteer roles for whenever they have time and are around, and are voices that we trust to be supportive of you when we’re not around.

If you haven’t already met Fletus (I’m sure you have!) he’s got years of experience and insight, and has already been hanging out and helping others in the Discord for weeks now! He also likes to share some really good memes over in #random as well. Give him wave and welcome next time you see him please!

2. Content

Unlocking the Power of OSINT - March 7th, 1PM EST

Our very own Community Instructor of the hour will also be taking us through a stream of unlocking the power of OSINT! You’re going to see live on stream just what open source intelligence can yield and its use cases. 🔥

Registration here: https://www.linkedin.com/events/7302405275712438272/comments/

Detection Engineering - March 8th, 12PM EST

We’re bringing Greg Ake on stream this Saturday where he’ll be going through the Detection Engineering content for SOC100-5! Little teaser below on what to expect!

Note that this originally was going to be content inside of CDA as a bonus, but we are moving this over into the SOC100-5 course so that everyone can get a shot at it instead of having to complete their Virtual SOC experience as a CDA Analyst.

SOC100 Class 31 Recording - Career Prep 3, Open Source & GitHub!

Class 31 dives you into the open source world while a deep discussion on the 2025 job market, as well as the history of things from 2020 to today. We then walk you through making your first full contribution to an Open Source project on GitHub to fork, clone, commit, push and pull and entire workflow. This is great easy (and free) experience to put on your resume!

Our First YouTube Short! 🎥

Short-form content! Finally. 😅 We’ve got plenty of long-form content. This was actually clipped by a viewer on last Saturday’s stream and turned out pretty well so we uploaded it as a short! We are going to try getting more of this content out come April onwards now that we’ve balanced the SOC100 stream schedule a bit more amongst other types of short-form content.

3. Community

Couple more certs handed out to the students! Keep up the good work everyone! 🏆️ 

Also some great shoutouts from the community on their takes on our training, always nice to see, thank you! 🙏 

4. Tools

• Really nice 100+ run commands on Windows that is helpful to have from @lyin: https://www.xda-developers.com/run-commands-work-efficiently-windows/

• Good resource for subnetting, an always rough thing to learn (and retain) from apu: https://cse.buffalo.edu/~hungngo/classes/2010/589/reading-materials/IP-addressing.pdf

• And another on subnetting from Ammo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_Ntt6eTn94

• Every now and then CS50 also gets re-upped, always worth a share again when it does from Sy: https://pll.harvard.edu/course/cs50s-introduction-programming-python

• A good watch on how Defender stacks up against 200 ransomware from Sy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oTRJNfjh_iU

5. Takeaway This Week

See you next week!