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Comment by waihtis | Hacker News Reader

Nice and hands on but feels very early 2000's. Nothing about cloud, AD, limited discourse about vulnerabilities which dominate (at least) the enterprise security space. Given how frequently the cybersecurity shortage is talked about one would think some higher education facilities would adopt a more modern position.

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" These lecture notes, at least several of them, made their first appearance on the web in 2006."

Looks like it's a broad and deep foundational course. I'd imagine really appreciating this theory priming, and then taking on more domain-specific courses.

Nice to have all of these materials available!

Can you elaborate on what you would add for the cloud, AD, or vulnerability content?

In my perspective what you listed are simply tools and vendor offerings of which reading the documentation or getting a vendor specific certification is the expected process. This course teaches the foundations on which the items you listed were built from. The reason you probably feel that its so dated is because security hasn't changed we just like to keep calling it different things. Classes like this tend to focus on the more permanent area of network protocols as most exploits just ride on top of existing standards which if you understand those you can understand the "latest" vulnerabilities, cloud infrastructure, IAM and so on.

here is a simple example: DDoS is handled on almost every app platform a developer can deploy on, but misconfigured cloud resources (#5 in the newest OWASP top 10) is not described here at all. In fact, the cloud primitives of compute, storage and workloads are not described and instead classic 2000's network security is covered.

The lectures aren't a how-to guide. The items that are explained are to provide reference to the lecture material. For example the apache2 setup could just as easily be nginx, lighttpd on Windows, FreeBSD, Redhat, etc. Its explaining the concept of a DDoS, malware, viruses, spam, cryptography. Cloud primitives? how would that relate to computer and network security instead of being covered in an operating systems course? They are just abstractions of physical hardware properties and would be specific to the implementation you were working on, ie AWS, GCP, Azure, etc. Any specific implementation or security is completely dependent on what the vendor implements and is ephemeral.

The OWASP top 10 is self described as an awareness document[1] it wouldn't be something you teach a college course on.

[1] https://owasp.org/Top10/A00_2021_How_to_use_the_OWASP_Top_10...

I haven't found a good modern security guide, it's either incomplete blogspam or dusty tomes like this one. It's not bad but I need recent practical advice, stuff like how to securely set up postgres and a reverse proxy, and not the bare example, something actually realistic, all I get are more firewall advice :(

In my experience "higher education facilities" are a nightmare of social extremes that inhibit the growth of "cyber security". But I'm usually wrong.

What do you mean?

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