Preparing for CISSP Exam

 I'm currently in the midst of preparing for the CISSP exam. I have been contemplating since last year whether I should go for CISSP exam (in the end I did my CCSP and I passed - read my post on the preparation here). This year I decided to prepare and take the CISSP exam.

Why I want to take the CISSP exam?

1. High Paying Jobs

I read many articles which mentioned that CISSP is always in the top 5 cybersecurity certifications to have high paying jobs.

2. Improving my cybersecurity knowledge

As a beginner in cybersecurity field, I definitely have a lot to catch up. My another intention is as I  prepare for CISSP, I can actually brush up my cybersecurity knowledge and fill the gaps that I have as much as possible.

What materials I use to prepare for the CISSP exam?

1. (ISC)2 CISSP Certified Information Systems Security Professional Official Study Guide

I bought the book and have been reading it since the beginning of my preparation. I think the book has good structure and there's definitely a lot of information on it. I think this book can be considered as the holy grail book when people are preparing for CISSP.

Buy CISSP Official Study Guide Bundle here at Amazon

2. LinkedIn Learning

I'm fortunate that my company provides LinkedIn Learning subscription to staffs so I actually watch the CISSP course by the same book author, Mike Chapple.

How to earn extra CPEs to maintain your (ISC)2 certification

Once you get certified, it doesn't mean that you can sit back and relax.

There is requirement of 90 CPEs within 3 years to maintain your (ISC)2 certification.

Of course there are various ways to earn your CPEs. In this post, I would like to introduce you to free CPEs which you can earn at spare time.

(ISC)2 Immersive Course

(ISC)2 provides various immersive courses on their website. It's free for members and there are some courses in other languages too.

I did take one of them and it took me around 6 hours to complete. I got 4 CPEs from this one immersive course.

So it's worth to take these immersive courses if you need extra CPEs.

My experience transferring money internationally using Wise

I want to share my experience with everyone on transferring money internationally using Wise. I've been away from my home country for a while now and often need to send money back to my parents occasionally. It's been quite a painful process before Wise (previously TransferWise. Yes, I've been their customer before they changed name).

Remitting money via banks or remittance service in Singapore are very tedious for me. And another point, the rates are not that good. Often they'll charge additional service fee that may eat up to the amount of money that you're going to send.

When Wise came up, I was originally skeptical on the service and whether they can be trusted. Anyway I did try out Wise with small amount of money first as a trial to understand their process and to check out their rates.

Few features that I like from Wise:

1. You can check the rate real-time and it's guaranteed for certain period of time.

2. You know how much you pay for the transfer fee and it's quite low compare to the banks.

3. You can see the fluctuation of the exchange rate in graph.

4. You know when the money will arrive to recipient's bank account.

5. When there's issue with your transaction, Wise will return your money fully, except the any fee incurred for transferring between your bank account to Wise account, if any.

6. There's a flowchart shown for your transaction as well so you know the current status of your transaction.

And, Wise is regulated by Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) and many other countries' authorities. 

I've transferred big amount of money to Indonesia and Canada so far and the experience is easy and fast.

If you want fuss free cross border transfer experience, try Wise. 

My cybersecurity journey just started

 Last year, I decided to move to cybersecurity role after my maternity leave ended and joined a local bank in Singapore.

I was lucky that I had ex-colleague who refer me to the position of cyber solutioning as my stepping stone into the field.

It was a steep learning curve, definitely. A lot of new cybersecurity terms that I didn't know before and I needed to spend extra time to research on them. 

I would say it's not an easy beginning, added with postpartum depression that might kick in. 

I stumbled upon mentorship program organized by (ISC)2 Singapore Chapter and immediately registered for it. My mentor was great and smart. He provided me with information that I needed when I just started my cybersecurity job. He also encouraged me to take CCSP exam because I have recent background in cloud. I was so inspired that I signed up to be the chapter's volunteer. Check out the (ISC)2 Singapore Chapter website for more details on our activities.

If you want to know how I prepared for my CCSP exam, I wrote a short post about it. 

I decided to leave the bank after 10 months to joined a tech company as IT GRC (Governance Risk Compliance) analyst. Here I get exposure to different role in cybersecurity. It's been 5 months now, there's still a lot to learn for me. But I enjoy this part of cybersecurity for now.

I'll sure update more on this cybersecurity journey here at my blog. Stay tune! :) 

My CCSP Exam Preparation

 Hi folks,

I've passed my CCSP exam on Dec 2021 (few days before new year 2022) and I would like to share how I prepared for it.

First, I would like to recommend the bundle book by Ben Malisow. They greatly helped to prepare me for the CCSP exam.

1. Certified Cloud Security Professional (CCSP) Official Study Guide

I read this book for around 2 months to fill the gaps of my foundational knowledge, which I feel is important to do. I don't want to pass the exam just for the sake of passing, but instead, I want to master the knowledge.

2. Certified Cloud Security Professional (CCSP) Practice Tests

I focused doing the questions on this book for the last 1 month of my preparation. I would flip back and forth between the question page and answer page to confirm if my answer was correct. The explanation at the answer pages helped me to confirm my doubts or provided me necessary refresher.

Get 30% off if you're buying the bundle books here

Buy the CCSP Official Study Guide Bundle at Amazon

Is there a way to make my preparation cheaper?

If you're based in Singapore, good news, Singapore's National Library has comprehensive list of ebooks, and these books are available there. You can borrow each ebook for 21 days and renew them once for another 21 days.

Setting Up HTTP(S) Load Balancer in GCP

Disclaimer: This is note from my self learning in GCP and may not be correct or complete. Qwiklabs https://google.qwiklabs.com/focuses/10258?parent=catalog

 

In general these are the steps:

• Create an instance template.

• Create a target pool.

• Create a managed instance group.

• Create a firewall rule to allow traffic (80/tcp).

• Create a health check.

• Create a backend service, and attach the managed instance group.

• Create a URL map, and target the HTTP proxy to route requests to your URL map.

• Create a forwarding rule.

#create startup.sh script

cat << EOF > startup.sh

#! /bin/bash

apt-get update

apt-get install -y nginx

service nginx start

sed -i -- 's/nginx/Google Cloud Platform - '"\$HOSTNAME"'/' /var/www/html/index.nginx-debian.html

EOF

#create instance template

gcloud compute instance-templates create nginx-template \

   --metadata-from-file startup-script=startup.sh

#create a target pool

gcloud compute target-pools create nginx-pool 

#create a managed instance group

gcloud compute instance-groups managed create nginx-group \

   --template=nginx-template --size=2 --target-pool nginx-pool

#Create a firewall rule to allow traffic (80/tcp)

gcloud compute firewall-rules create www-firewall \

  --allow tcp:80

#Create a forwarding rule

gcloud compute forwarding-rules create nginx-fwd-rule \

        --ports=80 \

        --target-pool nginx-pool

gcloud compute forwarding-rules list

#Create a health check

gcloud compute http-health-checks create basic-check

gcloud compute instance-groups managed set-named-ports nginx-group --named-ports http:80

#Create a backend service, and attach the managed instance group

gcloud compute backend-services create web-backend-service \

        --protocol=HTTP \

        --port-name=http \

        --http-health-checks=basic-check \

        --global

gcloud compute backend-services add-backend web-backend-service \

        --instance-group=nginx-group \

        --instance-group-zone=us-east1-b \

        --global

#Create a URL map, and target the HTTP proxy to route requests to your URL map

gcloud compute url-maps create web-map-http \

        --default-service web-backend-service

gcloud compute target-http-proxies create http-lb-proxy \

        --url-map web-map-http

gcloud compute forwarding-rules create http-content-rule \

--global --target-http-proxy http-lb-proxy --ports 80

Deploying Kubernetes in GCP

 This is note of my self learning in GCP via Qwiklabs https://google.qwiklabs.com/focuses/10258?parent=catalog

#change zone

gcloud config set compute/zone us-east1-b

#to create a cluster (this step takes few minutes to complete)

gcloud container clusters create nucleus-cluster

#authentication

gcloud container clusters get-credentials nucleus-cluster

#deployment

kubectl create deployment nucleus-server --image=gcr.io/google-samples/hello-app:1.0

#service

kubectl expose deployment nucleus-server --type=LoadBalancer --port 8080