Cisco Certified CyberOps Associate 200-201 Certification Guide

Glen D. Singh

• Publisher: Packt Publishing
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781800563483
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Cyber Security
• Index: Computer Science

Begin a successful career in cybersecurity operations by achieving Cisco Certified CyberOps Associate 200-201 certificationKey Features• Receive expert guidance on how to kickstart your career in the cybersecurity industry• Gain hands-on experience while studying for the Cisco Certified CyberOps Associate certification exam• Work through practical labs and exercises mapped directly to the exam objectivesBook DescriptionAchieving the Cisco Certified CyberOps Associate 200-201 certification helps you to kickstart your career in cybersecurity operations. This book offers up-to-date coverage of 200-201 exam resources to fully equip you to pass on your first attempt. The book covers the essentials of network security concepts and shows you how to perform security threat monitoring. You'll begin by gaining an in-depth understanding of cryptography and exploring the methodology for performing both host and network-based intrusion analysis. Next, you'll learn about the importance of implementing security management and incident response strategies in an enterprise organization. As you advance, you'll see why implementing defenses is necessary by taking an in-depth approach, and then perform security monitoring and packet analysis on a network. You'll also discover the need for computer forensics and get to grips with the components used to identify network intrusions. Finally, the book will not only help you to learn the theory but also enable you to gain much-needed practical experience for the cybersecurity industry. By the end of this Cisco cybersecurity book, you'll have covered everything you need to pass the Cisco Certified CyberOps Associate 200-201 certification exam, and have a handy, on-the-job desktop reference guide.What you will learn• Incorporate security into your architecture to prevent attacks• Discover how to implement and prepare secure designs• Identify access control models for digital assets• Identify point of entry, determine scope, contain threats, and remediate• Find out how to perform malware analysis and interpretation• Implement security technologies to detect and analyze threatsWho this book is forThis book is for students who want to pursue a career in cybersecurity operations, threat detection and analysis, and incident response. IT professionals, network security engineers, security operations center (SOC) engineers, and cybersecurity analysts looking for a career boost and those looking to get certified in Cisco cybersecurity technologies and break into the cybersecurity industry will also benefit from this book. No prior knowledge of IT networking and cybersecurity industries is needed.

Section 1: Network and Security Concepts

This section will be begin by introducing the reader to the fundamentals of security, security deployment models, factors, key terminology that is important to a security analyst, principles of defense in depth in security, and various access control models.

This section contains the following chapters:

• Chapter 1, Exploring Networking Concepts
• Chapter 2, Exploring Network Components and Security Systems
• Chapter 3, Discovering Security Concepts

Chapter 1: Exploring Networking Concepts

As an up-and-coming cybersecurity professional, it is important to have a solid foundation of the understanding of networking concepts such as the types of devices, the underlying network layers, and the protocols that help transport messages from a source to a destination. Understanding networking concepts helps a security professional to better grasp the fundamentals of knowing how threat actors, such as hackers, are able to discover security flaws in applications, operating systems, and network protocols. Hackers use these vulnerabilities to assist in delivering their malicious payload into their targets.

Throughout this chapter, you will learn about various networking technologies, protocols, and services, and how they all work together to forward your messages, such as data, between your device and the destination. As a cybersecurity professional, it is essential to fully understand how network devices and protocols function. To put it simply, many network protocols were not designed with security in mind, and threat actors usually take advantage of the vulnerabilities found within these technologies. Upon completing this chapter, you will be able to fully understand the networking aspects of cybersecurity, which many professionals struggle to grasp.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

• The functions of the network layers
• Understanding the purpose of various network protocols

Now that we are aware of the outcomes we are set to achieve, let's dive into the chapter!

Technical requirements

To follow along with the exercises in this chapter, please ensure that you have met the software requirement of having the Wireshark application installed on your computer. To obtain a copy of Wireshark, please visit https://www.wireshark.org.

Link for Code in Action video https://bit.ly/3ntp4jq

The functions of the network layers

Networking plays a vital role in everything we do on a daily basis. Whether your organization is using Slack or Microsoft Teams or traditional emails for internal communication between employees, your smartphone or computer is connected to a network. To fully understand how cyber-attacks and threats are able to infiltrate a system or network, you must first understand the fundamentals of networking.

Hackers are cunning; they are always looking for the easiest way to gain access to a system or network. They look for vulnerabilities, which are security weaknesses in a system, application, coding, or design, and try to take advantage by exploiting them. You may be wondering, what does this have to do with networking? To answer this question in a simple sentence, there are many network protocols that were not designed with any security in mind, thus allowing hackers to exploit their vulnerabilities.

To get a better understanding of the bigger picture of network protocols and applications, let's take a look at what happens when a device such as a computer sends a message such as data to a web server. Built into each modern operating system, whether it's Microsoft Windows, Apple macOS, or even the Android operating system, you will find a protocol suite, which is responsible for the encoding, formatting, and transmission of messages between a source and destination.

During the pre-internet age and the early stages of computer networks, many computer vendors created their own protocol suite to enable their devices to communicate on a network. The downside to such ideas was that each vendor made a protocol suite proprietary to their devices only. This means Vendor A devices would not be able to communicate with Vendor B devices if they were connected to the same physical network.

This concept was not scalable or adaptive. Eventually, two emerging protocol suites surfaced with promises to be interoperable with any vendor devices and networks. These two well-known protocol suites are as follows:

• The Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) reference model
• The Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) protocol suite

A protocol suite allows a device to format a message for delivery using a universal set of standards and protocols to ensure all devices along the path to the destination are able to read the addressing and data contents clearly. In other words, the protocol sui...