CyberOps Associate Bundle

For those individuals who want to ignite their careers in the cybersecurity sector and prove that they know everything about the cybersecurity operations, Cisco recommends obtaining the Cisco Certified CyberOps Associate certification. This option validates their knowledge of the fundamentals of cybersecurity operations, procedures, and skills. The certificate covers all the needed topics: from security concepts, monitoring, procedures, and policies to network intrusion and host-based analysis.

There are no official requirements that the interested candidates need to meet before going for this associate-level certification. The most important is to understand the concepts covered in the exam topics and be able to answer the questions connected with them. Besides that, there is no need to obtain additional certificates or clear some other tests.

Exam Details

To prove that the students have an understanding of the Cisco cybersecurity operations fundamentals and are eligible for the obtainment of this associate-level certificate, they are required to deal with the Cisco 200-201 test. This is a 2-hour qualification exam that is available in English and costs $300. You will have to deal with about 100 multiple-choice questions to get certified. To be sure that you pass your test without even retaking it, you need to possess a good understanding of the following topics:

• Security Concepts – This subject area is all about CIA triad, access control models, as well as security deployments, concepts, and terms. You should have the skills in identifying the challenges of data visibility in potential data loss or detection from the provided traffic profiles. Moreover, it is important to have knowledge of the 5-tuple approach that is needed for the isolation of the compromised hosts in the grouped set of logs. Knowing the difference between the rule-based detection as well as behavioral or statistical detection is also vital;
• Security Procedures and Policies – If talking about this part of the test, it measures your skills in identifying the elements that are used for server profiling or network profiling. It is also vital to know how to apply the incident handling process or map elements to the certain steps of analysis;
• Network Intrusion Analysis – This section contains the details of basic regular expressions, common artifact elements from an event necessary for the identification of an alert, as well as inline traffic interrogation and taps or traffic monitoring;
• Security Monitoring – As for this domain, it covers the details of attack surface and vulnerability as well as various network, web application, endpoint-based, and social engineering attacks. The potential candidates should be able to identify the certificate components and the types of data provided by the traditional stateful firewall, NetFlow, email or web content filtering, and TCP dump. The details of the impact of certificates on security as well as obfuscation and evasion techniques are what you should know about;
• Host-Based Analysis – The last objective evaluates your skills in comparing tampered and untampered disk images, identifying the components of an operating system, and identifying the type of evidence that is used based on the provided logs. To clear the questions from this area, it is also required that you know how to interpret the operating systems, applications, or command line logs in order to identify an event.

Further Career Path

Obtaining a prestigious IT certification from a well-known vendor is a sure way to improve your career. Thus, the Cisco Certified CyberOps Associate certificate is so popular among the current and future cybersecurity specialists. This is the perfect path to validate your skills and ask for a better salary or position. However, you have to remember that the Cisco certifications are available for 3 years. This means that at the end of this period, you are required to renew the status of your certificate. To follow the process of recertification, the interested individuals need to proceed with the Continuing Education program.