CompTIA Security+

About the course

The CompTIA Security+ course will help prepare you for the Network+ certification exam N10-009. Upon completion you will be prepared for a job role in network administration. A diverse range of career paths will open up to you, from network administration and support to cybersecurity, as well as opportunities for advancement and specialization in the rapidly evolving IT industry.

Prerequisite

There are no prerequisites for CompTIA Security+, however, industry standards suggest at least two years of IT administration experience with a security focus and perhaps the CompTIA Network+ certification before taking the exam.

Course Outline

• General security concepts (12%)

  • Security controls: comparing technical, preventive, managerial, deterrent, operational, detective, physical, corrective, compensating, and directive controls.
  • Fundamental concepts: summarizing confidentiality, integrity, and availability (CIA); non-repudiation; authentication, authorization, and accounting (AAA); zero trust; and deception/disruption technology.
  • Change management: explaining business processes, technical implications, documentation, and version control.
  • Cryptographic solutions: using public key infrastructure (PKI), encryption, obfuscation, hashing, digital signatures, and blockchain.

• Threats, vulnerabilities, and mitigations (22%)

  • Threat actors and motivations: comparing nation-states, unskilled attackers, hacktivists, insider threats, organized crime, shadow IT, and motivations like data exfiltration, espionage, and financial gain.
  • Threat vectors and attack surfaces: explaining message-based, unsecure networks, social engineering, file-based, voice call, supply chain, and vulnerable software vectors.
  • Vulnerabilities: explaining application, hardware, mobile device, virtualization, operating system (OS)-based, cloud-specific, web-based, and supply chain vulnerabilities.
  • Malicious activity: analyzing malware attacks, password attacks, application attacks, physical attacks, network attacks, and cryptographic attacks.
  • Mitigation techniques: using segmentation, access control, configuration enforcement, hardening, isolation, and patching.

• Security architecture (18%)

  • Architecture models: comparing on-premises, cloud, virtualization, Internet of Things (IoT), industrial control systems (ICS), and infrastructure as code (IaC).
  • Enterprise infrastructure: applying security principles to infrastructure considerations, control selection, and secure communication/access.
  • Data protection: comparing data types, securing methods, general considerations, and classifications.
  • Resilience and recovery: explaining high availability, site considerations, testing, power, platform diversity, backups, and continuity of operations

• Security operations (28%)

  • Computing resources: applying secure baselines, mobile solutions, hardening, wireless security, application security, sandboxing, and monitoring.
  • Asset management: explaining acquisition, disposal, assignment, and monitoring/tracking of hardware, software, and data assets.
  • Vulnerability management: identifying, analyzing, remediating, validating, and reporting vulnerabilities.
  • Alerting and monitoring: explaining monitoring tools and computing resource activities.
  • Enterprise security: modifying firewalls, IDS/IPS, DNS filtering, DLP (data loss prevention), NAC (network access control), and EDR/XDR (endpoint/extended detection and response).
  • Identity and access management: implementing provisioning, SSO (single sign-on), MFA (multifactor authentication), and privileged access tools.
  • Automation and orchestration: explaining automation use cases, scripting benefits, and considerations.
  • Incident response: implementing processes, training, testing, root cause analysis, threat hunting, and digital forensics.
  • Data sources: using log data and other sources to support investigations.

• Security program management and oversight (20%)

  • Security governance: summarizing guidelines, policies, standards, procedures, external considerations, monitoring, governance structures, and roles/responsibilities.
  • Risk management: explaining risk identification, assessment, analysis, register, tolerance, appetite, strategies, reporting, and business impact analysis (BIA).
  • Third-party risk: managing vendor assessment, selection, agreements, monitoring, questionnaires, and rules of engagement.
  • Security compliance: summarizing compliance reporting, consequences of non-compliance, monitoring, and privacy.
  • Audits and assessments: explaining attestation, internal/external audits, and penetration testing.
  • Security awareness: implementing phishing training, anomalous behavior recognition, user guidance, reporting, and monitoring.