Mossé Cyber Security Institute - 2022-08 Progress Update

The plan for August was to work on the System Administration Fundamentals (MSAF) certification. I have completed all of the “Virtualization Fundamentals” exercises and all but one of the “Network Fundamentals” exercises! I also completed a handful of other exercises from that certification, the Introduction to Cyber Security certification, and the Remote Cybersecurity Internship certification.

End of August Portfolio Summary

The numbers in parentheses are a comparison to last month.

Current Level: 7 (+2)

Total Points: 53 (+22)

Total Exercises: 53 (+23)

Career Development Milestones: Cybersecurity Learner - Level 2

Virtual Machines (VM)

I spent a lot of time learning about VMs in August. Before recently, I had only ever set up a couple of VMs. I have now set up Kali VMs, Ubuntu VMs, and Windows VMs in VirtualBox, VMWare, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Amazon Web Services (AWS), and VMWare ESXi!

Things I know now that I didn’t know before… how to:

easily create different types of VMs,
change a VM to fullscreen (this was trickier to figure out than it sounds!),
use various network types and why you would want to,
share a clipboard with the VM,
share folders with the VM,
clone a VM,
take a snapshot of a VM, and
export/import a VM.

I am also going through a tutorial on how to increase the disk size of a VM. I have deleted and re-created this VM enough now that it’s time to learn how to edit rather than start over!

My First Hurdle

My PC was having a hard time running VMs. Although the requirements for the Mossé Cyber Security Institute (MCSI) courses that I was working on were 8GB of random access memory (RAM), I was not sticking directly to the curriculum and wanted more RAM. Plus my disk space was running low as well.

This PC was a quick purchase in 2018 after I moved to Ottawa on a plane with just 2 suitcases. I wasn’t sure if Ottawa was going to be my forever home so I settled for a good price rather than a good PC. It had a small hard disk drive (HDD) and only 8GB of RAM (I didn’t even know what these words meant last month).

I bought a new 1TB M.2 solid-state drive (SSD) and 32GB of RAM. I don’t know much about hardware and had never taken a computer apart until now (the graphics card was replaced by my boyfriend)! It was not part of the course, but I took my computer apart and installed the new parts myself!

Setting Up The Server

My boyfriend and I bought a server a couple of years ago. We bought it for learning purposes and also used it to host gaming servers.

After learning more about virtualization last month, I installed a bare metal hypervisor (VMWare ESXi) on the server. Basically, this will let me run multiple virtual things within the server, such as machines (similar to what most people would refer to as a laptop or computer), servers, firewalls, etc. This will allow me to set up a whole virtual environment instead of having to buy a bunch of physical computers and other devices.

The goal is to eventually turn it into a virtual threat-hunting lab when I learn more!

Plan For September

So far I have been focusing on the beginner certifications. This month, I am going to focus on the intermediate Certified Blue Teamer course. This was the first course that I bought from MCSI. It was a little difficult when I tried it back in June due to my lack of fundamental knowledge. I didn’t know much about virtual machines at that time and I didn’t understand how to safely download malware (I was too nervous to even want to try!). I took a step back and focused on the System Administration Fundamentals course. Some of the exercises in that course helped me better understand the fundamentals and helped me feel more comfortable when working with malicious files.