Re: OS to know.

On 10/11/05, John Williams <ibmros@hotmail.com> wrote:
> I am a graduate student at George Mason University obtaining my MS in
> Information Security and Assurance. What operating system is used more for
> security administration in the private sector versus the government sector?
> Pretty much I would like to know what operating system I should focus on if
> I wanted to pursue a government career in security or if I wanted to purse a
> career in the private sector. Thanks.

George Mason?  Not to far from me (College Park).
Our environment is pretty much a Windows Server environment with a few
Linux boxes (network and desktop scenarios)

Best advise I can give is to learn the MS stuff and learn how to do
the same thing (LDAP vs Active Directory,  IIS vs Apache or vsftp,
etc) and secure in a *nix environment, or vice versa.  Popular choices
are SuSE, Redhat, Debian, and various BSD.

Above all though, I believe you really need to learn *nix not because
of it's production environment, but because of how much it can help
you.  tcpdump,  dsniff, nessus, nmap, etc all comes in handy in
tracking security concerns in any environment.
--
Mark Owen