Georgia Tech OMSCS Intro and My First Course (CS-6262)

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Computer Science had always interested me. However, it wasn’t available at the school I chose to pursue my bachelor degree. Thankfully I discovered the Georgia Tech Online Master of Science: Computer Science (OMSCS) program in which the Computing Systems specialization caught my eye. I decided to apply after about 1 year of consideration and to my delight, I recieved an acceptance notification.

As I near the end of my first semester, I figured it might be a great time to review the first course. This course more or less lines up with my current skillset which allowed me to get a feel for the program.

Enter CS-6262 Network Security

This course is mostly project based with 10 quizzes, 5 projects, and 1 final exam.

The quizzes are fairly easy as each are based on slides created by Professor Lee and a few research papers. These include topics such as:

  • Attack types
  • Malware Analysis,
  • Machine Learning
  • and more!

The projects are where the fun happens. These include:

  • Penetration testing
  • Cross Site Scripting
  • Malware Analysis
  • Writing Snort rules to detect various types of traffic
  • Machine Learning for Security.

My favorite so far was writing Snort rules as I had never had a reason to use Snort. This allowed me to further my skills in regard to traffic analysis and get creative with detection parameters. However, I imagine that the Machine Learning project will probably be my favorite once it is all said and done!

So far, I think this course is an excellent starter if you have information security experience!

Expect an update to this post as I have yet to finish the machine learning project (released a week ago) and our final exam doesn’t open until next week.

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