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Computer security and related computer-support specialties are among today's fastest-growing occupations. Getting a CompTIA Security+ credential is your first step to gaining entrance into this exciting, fast-paced field. By the time you finish this first lesson, you'll know what you need to do to achieve a Security+ credential. You'll also understand the basic goals, tools, and techniques of computer security.

This lesson reviews the tasks and actions a secure network administrator performs, including setting up security rules and ensuring secure device configurations. You will also learn what you need to consider in the design of a secure network, including definitions, structures, and methods that combine to create a secure network environment.

Lesson 3 explores the common network security protocols and ports in use on secure networks and focuses on which ones are most likely to show up on the Security+ exam. You'll learn the purpose and function of each of the protocols and features in this lesson. This knowledge will help you not only pass the exam, but also work as a successful secure network administrator.

If you work as a secure network administrator, you'll spend most of your days focusing on risk. Risk comes in many forms, and identifying, mitigating, and reducing risk is what network security is all about. In this lesson, you'll get a broad overview of how you can deal with risks. Explore security policies, risk analysis, risk control methods, and the duties of risk administration.

Despite your best efforts, there are times when a security incident will occur. In this lesson, you'll learn how to respond to an incident. Explore the forensic processes you can use to gather evidence after an incident and go over the procedures used to report and record the outcome of your investigation. With thorough incident response, you'll be able to minimize the damage from an incident and find out how you can prevent similar incidents from happening in the future.

This lesson explores some topics important to keeping your network secure and performing at its best, starting with user awareness. When it comes to preventing security incidents, how can you make an organization's employees your allies instead of your enemies? You will learn some compliance procedures, how to classify information according to its sensitivity, and then how to apply security protections accordingly. Next, you will learn some physical and logical security options. Finally, learn how to secure the network's environment from hazards such as weather, fire, and high heat or humidity. There's a lot to think about when securing a network, but you'll get a good grasp on the ins and outs in this lesson.

Many of the threats that face a secure network come from sources you might not expect. Network users can be unknowingly creating vulnerabilities every day. The Web provides avenues to attackers who wish to infect networks with viruses, phishing attacks, and other types of exploits. The expansion of social networking and even simple peer-to-peer file sharing across a network can also add new types of threats to your network. While these threats can affect the network, they can also interrupt the continuity of your business operations. This lesson investigates each potential threat and how you can keep threats at bay.

Even the best security designs and implementations are only in effect if an entire system is up and running. If part of a system or network fails, its security measures could also fail simply because they aren't running. This lesson looks at the various methods and technologies that help to ensure that a system or network remains up and running. Explore redundancy and fault tolerance; how RAID can help you achieve them; and high availability, clustering, load balancing, failover, and network resiliency. By the end of this lesson, you'll have a good understanding of how these technologies help prevent network downtime.

This is the first of three lessons in which focusing on threats and vulnerabilities. Lesson 9 covers the various types of malware, the different types of attacks that threaten your network, and the variety of social engineering attacks that seek to gain information about you, your users, your organization, and your network. Once you know your enemy, you'll be better prepared to protect your network.

So far, you have learned about many threats that affect wired networks. But wireless networks have their own unique set of threats and vulnerabilities. This lesson teaches you about wireless threats and vulnerabilities. You'll find out the strategies behind many wireless attacks, including client-to-client attacks, war jacking, interception attacks, and more. Finally, you'll see how to design a wireless network for maximum security and mitigation of these threats.

This lesson continues exploring the many types of threats and vulnerabilities that can hurt a network with a look at application and injection attacks. You will also learn about the actions of attackers, the types of attacks they can launch, and the mitigation methods used to determine the nature and damage of an attack. By the end of this lesson, you'll not only be well-informed about the types of attacks you can expect to see while working in network security, but you'll also know what methods you can use to prevent and minimize damage from attacks.

In the final lesson of the course, you will explore a few methods and security measures that you can apply to a network to reduce its vulnerabilities. First, understand the hardening process, which includes tasks such as securing accounts, removing unnecessary accounts, and applying port security. Then look at different types of intrusion detection and prevention systems. The lesson wraps up with the tools and processes some of these systems use. You will learn how you can put some of the concepts you've been learning throughout this course into practice on a network.