APPLY
COURSE

The Cyber Academy: Immediate Immersion

In this six-week “on-ramp” course, you will be working at a managed security service provider that provides outsourced information security services to a range of clients. You will investigate alerts by analyzing network traffic. We have designed this course to provide you with initial experience analyzing and understanding what alerts mean through three realistic hands-on tasks.

ENROLL
DOWNLOAD SYLLABUS
SKILL LEVEL

Beginner

DURATION

6 Weeks at 25 Hours per Week

CERTIFICATE OF COMPLETION

Included with Course Purchase

PREREQUISITES

A Pre-Assessment is Required

The Cyber Academy: Immediate Immersion

UPCOMING START DATES

No dates are scheduled at this time, please contact us to apply today!

THE CYBER ACADEMY

MONTH DAY
  • 34 Weeks at 25 Hours per Week
  • Application Deadline June 15
APPLY NOW

THE CYBER ACADEMY

MONTH DAY
  • 34 Weeks at 25 Hours per Week
  • Application Deadline June 15
APPLY NOW

THE CYBER ACADEMY

MONTH DAY
  • 34 Weeks at 25 Hours per Week
  • Application Deadline June 15
APPLY NOW

CURIOUS ABOUT CYBER SECURITY?

WHO SHOULD ENROLL

Students who wish to explore a career in cybersecurity to determine if it is right for them. The ideal student is intensely curious, unwilling to give up on a problem no matter how difficult it is, and predisposed towards self-directed learning.

APPLY

SKILLS TO TAKE WITH YOU

LEARNING OUTCOMES

Students will learn and practice key SOC analyst skills including:

  • Conducting online technical and open source intelligence research
  • Analyzing and verifying Snort alerts
  • Distinguishing between true and false positive alerts
  • Analyzing packet capture (PCAP) files
  • Analyzing suspicious user behavior
  • Identifying vulnerabilities based on vulnerability scans
  • Distinguishing between attacks and vulnerability scans
  • Identifying open ports using scanners such as NMAP, Nikto, and WPScan
  • Identifying OS/Application fingerprints
  • Analyzing attacks that employ exploit kits.
Learn More

ADVOCATE YOUR CAREER

CAREER PATHS

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Ut elit tellus, luctus nec ullamcorper mattis, pulvinar dapibus leo.
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Ut elit tellus, luctus nec ullamcorper mattis, pulvinar dapibus leo.
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Ut elit tellus, luctus nec ullamcorper mattis, pulvinar dapibus leo.
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Ut elit tellus, luctus nec ullamcorper mattis, pulvinar dapibus leo.

IMMEDIATE IMMERSION

UPCOMING START DATES

START DATE
PACE
CAMPUS
STATUS
August 7, 2023
Full-time
Online
Few spots left!
September 18, 2023
Full-time
Online
Open
AUGUST 7, 2023
Full-time
Online
Few spots left!
AUGUST 7, 2023
Full-time
Online
Few spots left!

compare and contrast

GO AT YOUR OWN PACE

FULL-Time

You’re ready to commit to a full-time course load. You’ll graduate in 15 weeks working 8 hours a day, Monday to Friday.

  • Paced to complete in 15 weeks
  • In person or online
  • Synchronous cohort learning
  • Group work with instructor
  • Paired with design sessions
  • Lab time with instructional staff
APPLY FULL-TIME
part-time

If you don’t have eight free hours to dedicate a day, then our part-time course offering is for you.

  • Paced to complete in 40 weeks
  • Online only
  • Asynchronous learning at your own pace
  • Recorded lessons
  • Live lectures and office hours
  • Slack with classmates and instructors
APPLY PART-TIME

finance options

TUITION FUNDING

We have teamed up with Meritize to offer our students a unique financing option. Meritize works with students, educators, and employers to help people succeed in skills-based careers. Want to learn more? Check out their FAQ page here, or give them a call at 833-MERIT-4-U. Ready to see if you qualify? Check your options.

Learn More

PROGRAM OVERVIEW

The field of Information Security deals with the ever-growing volume of threats to businesses and government entities. While hardening computer and network infrastructure with patching, firewalls, and intrusion protection systems is important, those tools will probably never stop the threats completely. Adept individuals are needed to monitor the security tools, watching for threats that bypass the automated protections. The analysts in the Security Operations Center (SOC) are the last line of defense. The SOC tries to detect and remediate threats that make it past the protections. The SOC analyst role has traditionally been an entry-level position, but a great deal of knowledge and skills are necessary for success.

The success of a SOC is difficult to measure since attackers and attacks never stand still: Everything is a moving target. Success is typically measured by reducing organizational risk by detecting, remediating, and automatically preventing future instances of known attacks. In reality, this is far beyond the capability of most SOCs today. And to make matters even worse, SOC analysts rarely have the tools, tactics, procedures, or training to deal with all the threats that can affect organizations today. Nobody wants to admit how difficult the struggle is, which means it’s difficult to even get the conversation going.

Qualifications for entry-level SOC analysts are problematic because most applicants have little if any training in information security. Realistically, an entry-level SOC analyst can only be expected to be passionate about security and have some networking background – which happens to be the prerequisites for this course.

In this six-week “on-ramp” course, you will be working at a managed security service provider that provides outsourced information security services to a range of clients. You will investigate alerts by analyzing network traffic. We have designed this course to provide you with initial experience analyzing and understanding what alerts mean through three realistic hands-on tasks. (Future courses will deal with log analysis, malware analysis, digital forensics, and incident response.)

If you cannot commit to enrolling into a program in its entirety, all of the courses from our programs, including Cyber Academy: Immediate Immersion, are available for purchase individually.

The Cyber Academy: Immediate Immersion

CURRICULUM

Students learn to think like attackers. They investigate a defense contractor’s website surreptitiously, fix a vulnerability, and remove malware. To accomplish this, they must use an LFI exploit uncovered by human intelligence to access to the webserver themselves and then crack the webmaster’s encrypted password, so they can remove the malware and patch the vulnerability that left the system open to attack.


OBJECTIVE:  Think like an attacker
OBJECTIVE:  Exploit a website using a local file inclusion vulnerability
OBJECTIVE: Crack a password
OBJECTIVE: Determine if a website has embedded malware
OBJECTIVE: Conduct online technical research
OBJECTIVE: Patch the code of a website to eliminate a local file inclusion vulnerability

You receive a report that an employee had unusual text on his screen which didn’t seem to be work related. The company’s security team captured a recording of that employee’s network traffic from the time of the report. Your task is to use two traffic analysis tools to determine what the employee was doing. Was his activity benign—or was this evidence of an insider attack?

OBJECTIVE:  Conduct an investigation of a cybersecurity incident
OBJECTIVE:  Analyze network traffic using NetworkMiner
OBJECTIVE: Analyze network traffic using Wireshark

You will analyze suspicious network traffic moving in and out of a US military aide’s personal laptop. Using packet capture (PCAP) files, you will determine if it was infected by malware and if so what malware and how the infection occurred. 


OBJECTIVE:  Analyze suspicious network traffic in a PCAP using Snort and Wireshark.
OBJECTIVE:  Recognize a cushion redirect in network traffic.
OBJECTIVE:  Recognize the identifying features of a specific exploit kit.
OBJECTIVE:  Recognize a malware payload being transferred to a targeted host.
DOWNLOAD SYLLABUS

Additional Information

Prerequisites

  1. Only basic computer skills are required, but basic knowledge of computer networks, protocols, and the fundamentals of operating systems is strongly recommended. 

  2. Taking and passing a free pre-assessment is REQUIRED before students are allowed to register for this program. If students have an IT background, they can ask to be exempted from this requirement.

Textbook: Practical Packet Analysis: Using Wireshark to Solve Real-World Network Problems, 3rd Edition by Chris Sanders is highly recommended for this course (ISBN-13: 978-1593278021). It can be ordered from nostarch.com (purchases made from nostarch.com include a full-text searchable ebook version of the text, available for download immediately after purchase) (Links to many additional online learning resources are provided within the course, specific to each task.)

Students must successfully complete Immediate Immersion 2021 to be permitted to enroll in the next course in this program, The Cyber Academy: Defense. Success will be assessed by a student’s mentors whose decision is final.

WHAT OUR STUDENTS ARE SAYING

TESTIMONIALS

“A student doesn’t really need much background and technology, you just need that determination to push through. If you can ask yourself the right questions, that’s all you really need to get through these programs”
“I didn’t have a whole lot of experience when I started these courses.”
“It was all pretty new to me. I had very bare minimum knowledge with computers prior to this [program].”
“It was a lot of problem solving, puzzles.”
“The program felt like a video game I was playing the entire time.”
“[If you] get a really good grasp on something small and build off of that, eventually you’ve got this story in front of you that you can piece together.”
“Having these obstacles and having to overcome these challenges, it makes you remember. You learn things kind of the hard way, but eventually you’ll have a good grasp on that concept.”
“I took a chance on myself. That’s honestly what I did when I joined this program. And I hope that anybody [on the fence] decides to take a chance on themselves too.”

Programs

APPLY

Terms & Conditions

SMARTSite by Site Hub

Privacy Policy