Well, I heard back from a potential employer, and I scheduled an exam to demonstrate that I know my stuff. Now to study/prep for it.
Honestly, I sometimes wonder what the point of that sort of testing is. Or rather, as my father says... everything you learn in school you will either use every day on the job and memorize it, or forget it. What's important is knowing how to learn and how to look things up.
This seems especially true with computers, as it's a very broad field. Even experts use Google to look things up, especially if it's a problem they don't see very often. Heck, there's a reason Linux commands have a 'man' or help page to tell you what the possible options are.
Some things... well, some things you only have to deal with once in a while... and if I'm doing it that rarely I'll probably give myself a refresher beforehand, if only to make sure I've got the latest and greatest knowledge about it (technology also changes at a pretty fast pace, after all.)
I sort of wonder if, maybe, I should ask to use my cell phone to look things up in an interview? I'd think that'd be more realistic, tbh, though I'm not sure it would fly.
Anyways. I wanted to get on to discussing businesses, and cyber security as it applies to them, but I figured I needed to expand my little postal service analogy a bit more.
If you happened to open Wireshark and tried monitoring your home network, you probably noticed a whole lot of traffic that you didn't initiate - you didn't put an address in your browser, or send an e-mail, or do anything directly to cause the traffic you're seeing.
That's because there's a whole lot of administrative work going on behind the scenes. Like in my earlier analogy, where I said that routers constantly send out messages to verify whether or not their neighbors are still up and running, or to announce their own status.
Imagine that our postal service has certain form letters. Heck, let's even make them different colors and sizes. Your website requests might all be sent in white envelopes, 8.5'' by 3''. Your e-mail messages might be sent in periwinkle blue envelopes, 5'' by 3''.
You'll see DNS requests, sent out to find the correct ip address before your actual website request (on a cream colored postcard).
Let's further imagine that everyone has their own personal Rosie, a robot maid that handles all your incoming and outgoing messages.
See, all the white letters sending and receiving information for a website get delivered to the front door. The periwinkle e-mail messages get delivered to a side door, where Rosie receives them and places them on a desk in your study. Once she has received all the letters for a particular e-mail she'll ring a bell, notifying you that there's a new message in your study.
Pale grey ICMP router advertisement messages checking on nearby routers may arrive by the back door, where Rosie receives and sends them without even bothering you.
A house, naturally, only has a few doors and windows... but a computer can make unlimited numbers of them. In networking we call them 'ports', and common methods of transmitting information are assigned a common or 'well-known' port.
You could even add that information to the mailing address, make it something like this:
Your E-mail Address
1 Main St.
Anytown, IL 99999-9999
Deliver to side door (Port 25)
Of course, the common protocols are so well known that you can leave that extra bit of instruction off. All web pages will be routed to your front door, even if you don't really specify it on the delivery address. In fact, for these well known ports, you would only add that extra information if you decided to change which door receives the messages for that protocol.
You could tell Rosie, for example, that you want all the web traffic to get delivered to the side door instead of the front, and so long as the delivery address says so it'll work out fine.
So now we can imagine someone at home, a stream of messages coming and going. All of them are actually handled by Rosie as they come and go through various doors and windows. Outgoing messages are collected by the mailman and sent through the postal service to the appropriate destination, and all incoming messages are delivered to the appropriate door or window.
Honestly, I sometimes wonder what the point of that sort of testing is. Or rather, as my father says... everything you learn in school you will either use every day on the job and memorize it, or forget it. What's important is knowing how to learn and how to look things up.
This seems especially true with computers, as it's a very broad field. Even experts use Google to look things up, especially if it's a problem they don't see very often. Heck, there's a reason Linux commands have a 'man' or help page to tell you what the possible options are.
Some things... well, some things you only have to deal with once in a while... and if I'm doing it that rarely I'll probably give myself a refresher beforehand, if only to make sure I've got the latest and greatest knowledge about it (technology also changes at a pretty fast pace, after all.)
I sort of wonder if, maybe, I should ask to use my cell phone to look things up in an interview? I'd think that'd be more realistic, tbh, though I'm not sure it would fly.
Anyways. I wanted to get on to discussing businesses, and cyber security as it applies to them, but I figured I needed to expand my little postal service analogy a bit more.
If you happened to open Wireshark and tried monitoring your home network, you probably noticed a whole lot of traffic that you didn't initiate - you didn't put an address in your browser, or send an e-mail, or do anything directly to cause the traffic you're seeing.
That's because there's a whole lot of administrative work going on behind the scenes. Like in my earlier analogy, where I said that routers constantly send out messages to verify whether or not their neighbors are still up and running, or to announce their own status.
Imagine that our postal service has certain form letters. Heck, let's even make them different colors and sizes. Your website requests might all be sent in white envelopes, 8.5'' by 3''. Your e-mail messages might be sent in periwinkle blue envelopes, 5'' by 3''.
You'll see DNS requests, sent out to find the correct ip address before your actual website request (on a cream colored postcard).
Let's further imagine that everyone has their own personal Rosie, a robot maid that handles all your incoming and outgoing messages.
See, all the white letters sending and receiving information for a website get delivered to the front door. The periwinkle e-mail messages get delivered to a side door, where Rosie receives them and places them on a desk in your study. Once she has received all the letters for a particular e-mail she'll ring a bell, notifying you that there's a new message in your study.
Pale grey ICMP router advertisement messages checking on nearby routers may arrive by the back door, where Rosie receives and sends them without even bothering you.
A house, naturally, only has a few doors and windows... but a computer can make unlimited numbers of them. In networking we call them 'ports', and common methods of transmitting information are assigned a common or 'well-known' port.
You could even add that information to the mailing address, make it something like this:
Your E-mail Address
1 Main St.
Anytown, IL 99999-9999
Deliver to side door (Port 25)
Of course, the common protocols are so well known that you can leave that extra bit of instruction off. All web pages will be routed to your front door, even if you don't really specify it on the delivery address. In fact, for these well known ports, you would only add that extra information if you decided to change which door receives the messages for that protocol.
You could tell Rosie, for example, that you want all the web traffic to get delivered to the side door instead of the front, and so long as the delivery address says so it'll work out fine.
So now we can imagine someone at home, a stream of messages coming and going. All of them are actually handled by Rosie as they come and go through various doors and windows. Outgoing messages are collected by the mailman and sent through the postal service to the appropriate destination, and all incoming messages are delivered to the appropriate door or window.
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