Using Security Tools Course

Welcome to the Virtual Training Company course Using Security Tools. I'm Bobby Rogers and I'm going to be your guide throughout this course. Now, this course is a little bit different than what you might have taken with other Virtual Training Company courses or other courses where you may have sat in a classroom or even books you might have read and the reason this is a little bit different is that we're not going to cover a lot of theory or concepts during the course. What this course entails is basically how to use basic security tools that all security practitioners should be able to use. We're going to cover fundamental knowledge, fundamental hands-on demonstrations of tools and techniques that relate to all areas of computer security. We're going to try to cover cutting edge versions of tools; in other words we're going to try to use tools that are in use today by security professionals around the world. Now, we'll touch here and there on some tools that have been around for a while and are still widely used because they're tried and true but we are going to focus primarily on cutting-edge tools, new tools. Now, we've categorized these tools rather loosely and you can slice and dice some of these categories any way you would like but we've categorized them and you can basically follow along. You can take this course and look at the tool demonstrations basically in any order you'd like or you can look at them in the order that most interest you; that's most important to you. Now, some of these may fall in specific categories. For example, we've got some tools that are listed in the Linux Tools category but they're also network security tools or they might be forensics tools. So don't feel bad if these aren't categories exactly the way you think you might put them in a category because they usually fall into a wide range of different areas and again, these are basic, common tools that all security practitioners should be familiar with. There's good training out there but there's a lack of hands-on demonstrations. I've met a lot of security professionals over the years that knew their concepts and their knowledge very well but maybe they had never been exposed to a particular tool before or had never worked with it and in this world of security we live in now, if you're a security professional, you need to have exposures to all these different tools. So having said that, let's go ahead and look at some of the tools we're going to cover and some of the categories we're going to talk about. As I said, we've divided these up and this may be nothing more than arbitrary way of categorizing certain tools but we've done the best we can to put them in a logical order. Again, you may look at this and decide to take this in any order you would like but here's the categories that we've divided it up into. We've got General Security Utilities and these are utilities that are normally cross-platform. They may or may not be specific Windows or Linux tools. They may be used across platforms. There may be a Windows version and a Linux version. Then we're going to talk about specific Windows utilities. These are specific to the Windows Operating System; some things you won't find in Linux and also right after that we're going to talk about Linux-specific tools, security tools and we'll cover command-line tools and GUI tools throughout this course; sometimes versions of both, sometimes just command-line version or just the GUI version. The next category we'll look at will be Scanning and Reconnaissance Tools and these are tools that you would use, let's say you might be doing a pen test or you might be doing vulnerability scanning on your network. These tools will help you do that. Then we're going to look at specific Network Security Tools. We'll also look at Wireless Security Tools as well. Then we're going to go to Web Tools. We'll look at web-based tools that you might find on an Internet site or an Internet site that would help you manage web security. We'll also look at Encryption Tools as well. These tools cover data at rest on your system and how to encrypt that and also tools that cover how to encrypt data in transit; that's being transmitted across unsecure networks. We've also thrown some Penetration Testing Tools in there as well; Hacker Tools for lack of a better word that I think you'll find very interesting that security professionals need to know also. They're not just for hackers. They're for security professionals to learn how to use to secure their own networks. We'll also look at Computer Forensics Tools and these tools are very useful in the incidence response arena of computer security. You'll learn to use these tools to gather and collect evidence and analyze it on computer systems. Then we're going to take a generic look at Live Linux Distros and these are becoming very popular in the security world in that they're very easy to use, they hold a wide variety of security tools and they make using these tools very convenient and usually they're in the form of Linux Distros, live distros that you boot up a computer with and you can either examine the computer itself or you can examine the network around it. And then finally we'll look at building a security toolbox and we'll do this several different ways including building a Linux distro of your own or putting specific tools on a USB thumb drive and so forth. So we're going to look at a wide range of tools and how to use them and that's what this course is going to focus on is how to use the tools. We'll look at what the tool is used for, how it's used, different options and techniques and so forth in using the tool and this is what we'll talk about, we'll stay focused on throughout this course. So sit back and enjoy it but don't sit back too much. I want you to look at the course. I want you to look at the tool demonstrations and then I want you to do some work on your own, set up a practice lab or practice computer and actually work with these tools. That's the only way you're going to get good at using them is actually by using them. So let's go ahead and jump into this right now. I hope you enjoy the course.