Cybersecurity

Nmap sends packets and listens for what comes back. What comes back tells you more about a network than most administrators know about their own infrastructure. Gordon Lyon released Nmap in 1997 in a Phrack magazine article. It has been in active development since then and has appeared in over a dozen films, including The Matrix Reloaded, Die Hard 4.0, and Bourne Ultimatum, because filmmakers use it when they need a terminal to look like actual hacking. It is one of the most widely used security tools in existence, and most people who run it do not fully understand what it is doing. ...

DarkSide did not use a sophisticated zero-day to shut down 45 percent of the East Coast fuel supply. They used a password found in a leaked credential database and an account that had no multi-factor authentication. On May 7, 2021, Colonial Pipeline shut down 5,550 miles of pipeline after discovering a ransomware infection. That pipeline moves 100 million gallons of fuel per day and supplies gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel from Texas to New York. It stayed offline for six days. ...

The Security+ exam will ask you to match a port number to a protocol. The job will ask you to look at a SIEM alert at 2 AM and decide whether it is worth waking someone up. Those are different skills. The certification is still worth getting. But going in without understanding the gap leaves you underprepared for the work even after you pass. What the Exam Tests The current Security+ (SY0-701) has up to 90 questions across 90 minutes. CompTIA divides the content into five domains: General Security Concepts, Threats, Vulnerabilities and Mitigations, Security Architecture, Security Operations, and Security Program Management and Oversight. ...

Brute force guesses passwords. Credential stuffing already has them. That distinction matters because the defenses are different, and most people conflate the two. If you lock an account after five failed attempts, you stop a brute force attack. You do almost nothing to stop credential stuffing. What Credential Stuffing Actually Is When a company gets breached and loses its user database, those credentials get sold, traded, and published. Have I Been Pwned tracks over 14 billion compromised accounts as of 2026. That number grows every month. ...