Derp, thanks for the prompt. I’d like to move to a position for more income. Government or private. Currently at $127k / yr.

Looking for cert guidance!

I’m a late-40’s life-long IT guy, working as a cybersecurity architect / deputy CISO for a state govt agency the last few years. I have my CISSP and bachelor’s in IT mgmt from WGU.

I have access to free microsoft classes & cert tests through my employer. Thinking about going back and getting some certs. Does it make sense to do the security certs in order?

SC-900, SC-100-200-300-400, AZ 500

Or am I overthinking it and I should just jump in and try a test to see how I do?

Also off work today, so it’s pet-project time: I have some scripts that collect local housing rental prices. I’ve been collecting this information in a sqlite db using python webscraping libraries, so I can chart the effects of gentrification and homelessness in my (small, rural) community.

Thanks for doing these. We’re here, this community is growing, and your encouragement and nudging is good 😀

I could use a resume review.

I’m a security architect in the public sector, state government. I started as an entry level sysadmin around 2000. I’m being strongly encouraged to apply for the CISO position here. I’m 46, and currently lead a team of 3.

Every time I apply for the private sector, including lower level jobs, it’s crickets. If I apply for govt work, I get people banging on my door.

How do I get a resume review, or someone to point out what I need to make the jump from govt to private sector?

Always love these kinds of questions, and love how you are working to build this community.

I work for a government agency as a deputy ciso, and I’m putting together a decision package for legislature to request new staff. I’m looking for five new members of my team, which would slightly double our size. It’s a very long process, which involves a lot of capacity planning, reading strategic plans and tying it to things other people have talked about, demonstrating work bottlenecks through metrics from our soc, and leveraging relationships and capital Goodwill that I’ve built over the last couple years.

Cross your fingers for me.

This is excellent, very useful for continuing to make images accessible on the fediverse

t every company should have? Is there even a frame

I was the lone security person there for a bit. Now there’s 4 of us. I broke it down into two risks:

service / system outage data breach / loss

The way I approached shoring up defenses was with specific activities each week:

vulnerability remediation audit & compliance incident response governance & policy security awareness program

It might help to think of things in a maturity model. Putting in a SEIM is a big job, and maybe more appropriate for when the security program at your org has matured more. What you can do is spend time working on the other stuff - what’s your endpoint protection? What compliance requirements do you have? How’s your inventory & asset management? What’s policy look like? Do your AD accounts all make sense? What’s the password policy? Do you have any old service accounts?

Picking little stuff allows you to make progress, and gets you ready to move to the bigger things. A mentor once told me to use a checklist (for life in general, but applies to cyber):

1 Did they ask you for help 2 Do you have it to give 3 Have you done enough for now

Good luck!

This was great! Love bikini kill, nice to see a Ska cover :)