My honest and personal review of the Network Security course I took during the Spring semester 2023.
Expectations VS Reality
I enrolled into this course as a follow up to another Cisco course I had completed in the previous semester (CyberOps Associate) under the same instructor Ville Haapakangas and was somewhat expecting SOC-2 analyst related skills in this course, but I was plesantly surprised.
Challenges To Overcome
The course was a lot more fast paced than I expected it to be, lasting only 1 period instead of 2 like normal courses. I was also on a pseudo-vacation, spending the entire month of January in India to get away from the harsh finnish weather :) And probably the biggest set back was the lectures being in finnish language (completely my fault as the course is only implemented in finnish language, yet I still chose to enroll and go through with it)
Credit where credit is due but Ville made it very easy for me to follow along and all the course work content present on netacad.com has always been in english so doing the course on your own isn’t that difficult.
What I learnt
Through the duration of this course I learnt a lot of new things about cisco routers and how they should be secured before deploying into production environments. My personal favourite topics were about ACL’s and Firewalls and VPNs. It was also fun learning how to configure ASA and finding the similarities between router commands and ASA commands.
The packet tracer labs and in person labs also helped a lot, I did most of the labs in my free time so I rarely had any help, but ChatGPT came to the rescue whenever I was stuck. Figuring out small things and debugging why my VM would never get the correct virtual network adapter in the first try was definitely fun. I think I spent around 5-6 hours just to configure freeradius on the kali VM before giving up and downloading the confs from another VM :)
The practical exam was also a learning in its own way, really showed me how easy it is to miss crucial but basic steps and over complicate things.
In all honesty I think I scored around 70/100 on the practical exam, only thing I messed up was the VPN configuration as my isakmp sa were not matching so the Phase 2 would fail.
During the practical I even forgot how to set the ip route for a hot minute, but thats nothing google and traceroute can’t help you fix.
Conclusion
While I enjoyed this course it was a bit too much networky for me, too much layer 2 business going around here. Still it was an awesome course where I learnt a bunch of things and came to understand the OSI model a bit more.
Grade Assesment?
Grade: I am happy to inform that I received a grade 5