Re: Career Choice

["David" <david () clicksee net>]

There are a lot of hacker how to instructionals. Why not learn to hack and 
then you'll know a lot about what you need to do to defend.

Try johnny.ihackstuff.com, www.zone-h.org/en, and http://www.illmob.org/ to 
start.

There are a lot of instructionals on CD too that you can buy...

My advice, make a cool website, start at a help desk or doing desktop 
support and work your way in at a software company. Once you have your foot 
in the door they'll promote you if they see you have programming skills.

I was an English major and worked as a release manager taking care of the 
development servers and moving code to QA and live for a software dev 
company after starting out doing HTML formatting...

That's my experience anyway...


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Britton, Jeff B." <JBBritton () LMUS LeggMason com>
To: "'Richard Kirk'" <saviente () gmail com>; 
<security-basics () securityfocus com>
Sent: Wednesday, March 09, 2005 1:11 AM
Subject: RE: Career Choice


> I've been in security for appx 2 years now, and I can't begin to tell you
> how much programming experience helps.  An overall programming language
> class is critical - to understand the building blocks of all languages, 
> both
> sequential and object oriented.
>
> Not only do you become capable of automating many parts of your job (which
> in turn saves time and $$...something every manager likes to see) but you
> are also able to get a much better handle on specific 
> vulnerabilies/expoits
> and how they directly affect whatever you are investigating.
>
> Be very careful when you get into MIS or CIS... I was a COSC major and can
> tell you that CIS and MIS are much broader degree's, and for lack of a
> better term, much easier than COSC or similar.  If you want to break into
> the security industry right out of school, you'll probably need one of two
> things...
> 1. A darn impressive resume
> 2. An inside contact to get you a job
>
> Best of luck.
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Richard Kirk [mailto:saviente () gmail com]
> Sent: Tuesday, March 08, 2005 8:10 AM
> To: security-basics () securityfocus com
> Subject: Career Choice
>
>
> I am currently a student at DeVry University studding Network
> Communications Management. My true concentration is in security
> forensics.
>
> In any case the more I looking into vulnerabilities and network flaws
> the issues come from within the programming of the
> application/protocol etc. and most assaults use multiple programming
> languages to execute these attacks.
>
> I have two questions, the first is should I be learning how to
> program? My current studies have only one programming language course
> (Intro to Java). Second, will the Bachelors degree I'm getting help me
> get into the field I'm looking for or should I change my major to
> something else such as MIS or CIS?
>
> Thank You for your time
> Best Regards
>
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