Vulnerability Management
For system and network administrators who are tired of guessing whether their controls work. Two graduate courses in penetration testing, worked hands-on in a virtual lab, you find the vulnerabilities in an enterprise yourself, and you learn to write them up so someone can act on them.
Overview
A vulnerability scan tells you what a tool noticed. A penetration test tells you what an attacker could actually do with it. The gap between those two things is where most enterprise security programs quietly live, and closing it is a skill you can only build by doing it.
This certificate is built around a virtual lab. Across two graduate courses you work with the open-source tools professionals use, Metasploit, John the Ripper, Wireshark, to understand how vulnerabilities are found and exploited, how to test whether your control tools are doing their job, and how to monitor an enterprise for what they miss. You cover the most common system exploits, system pivoting and client-side attacks, and you practise the legal and ethical boundaries that separate authorized testing from the alternative.
The second course moves to advanced tooling and more complex engagements, still in the lab.
The part worth emphasizing is the last step of each engagement: assessing enterprise security controls and system vulnerabilities, and documenting the findings accurately. Norwich's own course description names documentation explicitly, and it is what distinguishes someone who can run a tool from someone an employer can send to a client.
Norwich teaches this as an institution designated by the National Security Agency and the Department of Homeland Security as a Center of Academic Excellence in Cyber Defense.
What you will learn
By the end of the certificate you will be able to:
- Run a penetration test against a computer network, start to finish, in a virtual lab built for it
- Use the Metasploit Framework with enough fluency to be useful on a real engagement, alongside John the Ripper and Wireshark
- Identify the most common system exploits and vulnerabilities, and recognise them in an environment you have not seen before
- Execute system pivoting and client-side attacks; the techniques that turn one foothold into access
- Test whether your own control tools actually detect and stop what they claim to
- Monitor an enterprise for the activity those controls miss
- Assess enterprise security controls and system vulnerabilities as a structured assessment rather than a tool run
- Document findings accurately enough that someone who was not there can prioritize and fix them
- Work within the legal and ethical boundaries of authorized security testing
For your next step visit:Certificate Admissions
For complete details on tuition costs:
Tuition and Fees
