We are now in the third week in of the year 2021.
I've currently started working on my way to my third GIAC certification: GPYC (Global Information Assurance Certification Python Coder) by enrolling in SANS SEC573: Automating Information Security with Python.
I love Python and learned it a while back. I do a lot of work on integrating and automation engineering and figured this would be a great course to certify in; especially after researching the instructor and course via a series of youtube videos and webinars.
It should be a fun year of training, learning and overall getting better.
Compared to the previous years there are now tons of Cyber Range and Online CTFs (Capture The Flag) events, it's quite a task to try and participate in all of them.
Last year I set my personal goal to participate/compete in at least 15 of them and turns out I jumped over that goal and participated in 21 Cyber Range/CTF events!
Something else that changed is that after 12 years of switching to Apple Mac, I've now switched back to Windows PC.
The main deciding factor is that Apple is moving away from Intel and into it's own silicon M1 (ARM) starting with 11.1 Big Sur, and I need to keep Intel in my life for compatibility reasons.
Then not to mention more surprises such as Red Hat's RHEL/CentOS distribution EOLing CentOS 8 prematurely and moving to CentOS stream. I'm still on the fence of trying out Rocky or Oracle to replace the void of CentOS.
This is also my first blog post in I don't know how many years, so we'll see how long I keep this up before my priorities get reshuffled.
Best - Israel Torres 2021-01-10 @israel_torres (link to this blog post)