What is your opinion of certificates from GIAC/SANS? They seem to be more substantial.
I was typing an entire response to you and some how fat fingered it into the bit bucket, so I’ll summarize my response real quickly. They SANS stuff is fine for people who have a significant background before they even enter the class room or pick up a book. I find that most people in the “security field” lack the necessary background like our music major in this article.
Most managers are totally unaware of any technical information and therefore are not capable of even knowing whether a job applicant is qualified or not.
Essentially Certificates are proof of an individuals attempts to keep up with the field. A person would need a lot of certificates after thousands of dollars to prove sufficiently to me that they have the knowledge I acquired in 33 years of On the Job Training and 6 years of education at the BS and MS levels in CS. I had some responsibilities with regards to security and it was difficult to sleep at night with the level of knowledge I have.
Uncle Sam paid for many hours of my “ethical hacker” training and hence I knew that security was always behind the curve and always playing catch up.
Read my tagline.
Imagine an OS call with an undocumented flag that’s not in a header that executes (e_uid = 0) instead of (e_uid == 0).
That’s a single character difference that would be easy to slip into a device driver in a Git repository on an Open Source project somewhere unnoticed. It might even make it into production.
I retired! I sleep much better now. I would not want another security job for all the tea in china! A whole stack of certificates obtained in intense two week classes doesn’t in-still great confidence in me either. I retired because of crap like that for which I had no control and my supervisors had no clue. I’m not even suppose to talk about what I worked on. It scared the shit out of me.
It’s Scary stuff when one mistake can severely impact the lives of millions! It’s a young man’s game and he better be diligent and brilliant. I’m done with it. Thank god. Probably took 10 years off my life.