I’m currently studying for the Security+ exam. Well, I’m done studying. I’m waiting to get my exam voucher from WGU now and go take the exam. Most of it is pretty straight forward stuff. If you have even a passing interest in infosec, most of it should be review. What I found most interesting while studying was disaster recovery and cryptography.

The DR was interesting just because I haven’t really given it a lot of thought before. I make onsite and offsite backups of my personal data and have read and (try to) live the Tao of Backup, but formal DR plans and procedures aren’t something I’ve done. I find it really interesting, especially from mindset of availability being one of a security officer’s responsibilities in conjunction with general IT staff.

My study also included some brush up on cryptography. I’ve always enjoyed learning about cryptography. I read Simon Singh’s “The Code Book” when I was younger and really enjoyed it (great book if you’re interested in learning about crypto and its impact on history). Even though math hasn’t always been my favorite subject, I always enjoyed reading about crypto and how it worked. Of course I knew about symmetric vs asymmetric cryptography and RSA/PGP, but I learned things like the differences between block and stream ciphers, how RC4 is used securely in SSL and insecurely in WEP, Twofish being beat by Rijndael for the AES standard, Blowfish was designed by Bruce Schneier (who I love), etc.

People on the Techexams forums have been singing the praises about Darril Gibson’s Security+ book. Though WGU provided adequate learning resources and only a dead tree edition is available, I decided to just go ahead and buy Darril’s book anyway. I wasn’t at all disappointed that I did, even if I bought it just before Amazon decided to drop the price from list price. 🙁 Hopefully a Kindle edition will be available soon. Last I heard from Darril in a blog post was sometime in the next 3 months. Anyway, you’ll find an excerpt from my review below.

I just finished reading Darril Gibson’s updated Security+ exam preparation guide “CompTIA Security+: Get Certified Get Ahead: SY0-301 Study Guide“. The book is well written and seems to throughly cover the exam objectives of the SY0-301 as posted by CompTIA. I haven’t sat for the exam yet, but feel completely confident I will pass due in part to this guide.

As with most exam prep guides, this book contains practice questions and exams. The one thing that sets this book apart from others is the inclusion of detail explanations as to the correct answer for each question. Sometimes you’re left wondering about the rationale behind a certain answer being correct or the “best” answer, but this book leaves no mystery with its detailed answer keys. This is one feature I’d definitely like to see in more exam prep books.