HG - Hacking College, a Cybersecurity Career, and Certifications - Marcus Carey

thank you so much I know mid afternoon after lunch you probably would much rather cool up and take a nap but we wanted to bring in sort of a community hero sort of a leader yeah that's you to really talk about you know overall career strategy and really share his story we're really thankful that thread care came on as the sponsor here in higher ground without further ado Marcus Carey [Applause] hey thanks thanks a lot my wife's here in the front row so she thinks I'm awesome now thank you very much you gonna think I'm kind of a badass I love it alright so hey thanks for coming I'm always surprised when I have more

than one or two people in the room with me so I'm usually usually I usually do these talks in the mirror to myself to make myself feel good all right so I'm gonna go through like the kind of things that I kind of been through as far as like how I got to where I'm at right now some people think that I've done some pretty cool stuff so I want to share with everybody so hopefully this all works imma donate with Chromebook all right so when I was 18 years old I joined the US Navy and I was like really fortunate that I scored pretty high my ASVAB test the military entrance exam and on it on that exam I

tested out high so I ended ended up going to the Crypt fill fill sardian cryptography I got I went to Pensacola Florida and trained doing all kind of cool stuff and uh it was pretty interesting because I didn't know at the time uh my my my recruiter was funny because he didn't have a clearance or anything he was what they call a boat's inmate in the Navy we got any sailors in the house Marines a Marine Marines a sailor to me all day all right so uh bosun's mate don't they're they kind of like drive the ship and all that stuff they don't they don't do like you know you know check related work so my sounds

like what's the CT in Miami Cody says I don't know it's classified I don't know so and so ended up work for NSA and central security service for eight and a half years while I was in which was pretty dope so what's funny is a um I tell people all the time I don't I don't I might I'm like really I'm ghetto I'm hood and but I was at NSA with all these like brilliantly smart people and and I learned a lot of our technology so I'm still uh crazy when it comes to a lot of stuff if you follow me on Twitter you know I'm crazy so but anyway got the work at NSA and uh I'm not crazy

yes so we're working for it for those people what was cool so there I started doing certifications and uh in out of military friend telling me hey before you get out the military you have to take these things called CLEP tests or Dante's tests or whatever who's ever taking any of those tests so I it's a conspiracy that most people don't take these tests because the colleges won't make money unless you because you could save like tons of money on this also in the military I started learning how to take tests so in the Navy what you have to do every twice a year I believe you have to take a test for promotion and so

it's a very technical test they give you a study they tell you what the test is on the beyond and you have to study those subjects and you have to take the test it's usually on your your career fill or rate if you're unlisted so being enlisted I got to learn how to take tests really well so that test taking things have taken me a long way so a lot of stuff I'm going to talk about is how I take certification tests and and I've taught this to a lot of people and it works really good so I see a lot of people online asking how do I get this cert how do I get that cert so I'm going

to tell you how to how to I'm gonna give you cheat codes so you can pass any certification and I've taken lot of them so on this list a long time ago it's to take a lot of certifications somebody's expired even some of these are evergreen but most of them have expired all the Cisco stuff so now I'll give you this is going to be funny I'm going to dispel a lot of myths everybody that works at NSA is not really smart so there's janitors recurrences and it's nothing wrong with being a janitor but the truth is like if I said I worked to NSA and you probably think I was amazing but I could be a cook or

something right which is awesome but they don't mean it I'm smart all right so there I started off in it so how the NSA works is they have tons of military people like myself doing a lot of support roles so I rob the NSA I was the e5 and they put the military on the crappiest jobs that they can give you it's so funny and the contractors and civilians at NSA do the cool stuff but what I started finding I'm all I ask more questions than anybody ever ever asked I know my wife might ask more questions than I do that but uh I'm the most inquisitive first you want to know I'm not afraid to not know anything

sometimes people accuse me being a jerk but actually I I love being the dumbest person in the room so I asked tons of questions about anything so I when I was at NSA I used to ask these people that I thought were or beasts like man this person is doing Cisco or whatever and I was like hey how do you do this and and I would ask them questions and stuff and they would they would tell me answers that I thought were right and this is what you're gonna this is this is the theme of my life even in cybersecurity you're gonna ask a bunch of questions to a lot of people and one of my texts our

mentors told me that there is a lot of wrong answers so just because people tell you something don't mean it's true I mean have to think stuff I could tell you could be a total lie I don't know I'm gonna try to keep it real done so here's the deal and I say these people were telling me this stuff and I was like okay cool that's how this work that's how that work but when I started reading text and materials like CCNA for example I started like wow that person doesn't know what they're doing the more you know the more you know that you don't know a lot of stuff but it the thing is I think most of us are it's

kind of funny because I'm gonna throw out a term I think we're all actors I think we're all acting a role and I think like just like an actor acts in the script you have to understand your script in a role that you're playing and you can learn it so if you look at my man Denzel Washington will get more on Denzel a little bit here Denzel studies the part so well that he diverted he develops ticks and all these people like Brad Pitt I love Leonardo DiCaprio he all these people study their character that they're playing so I think in real life you have to study what you're trying to do to play the

role I'm really confident we're all actors so started studying my CCNA and now this is how it progressed the NSA and and forgive me if I sound like I'm bragging on anything I'm just stating facts start at NSA they had me doing a crappy job trying to do this audit this messaging platform for the whole world so what school you had you get cleared and you see every piece of Intel ever right what was crazy is an 18 19 year old it was hilarious because I was like totally panic and thinking the world is always going to go to war the troops are amassing here about you get to read all this Intel you like man but then I found

out later that sometimes Intel gets it wrong right so so that got the got the work in the NSA was working a crappy job and like then man I'm doing messaging it's like seriously kill the alarm kill the beep that was the job and there were civilians here working for years and that was their job it was like they will push their button oh it's a button ringing right no this is my button right here and that's why was some civilians were NSA so hurt if there's any NSA people here they know what I'm talking I'm spitting the real keeping it 100 so so I did my CCNA it's like wow universe CCNA in this whole department or

whatever NS 8 right the first CCNA at the joint and then I buy CC and fee and I got promoted to a day job which is a dream job a lot of NSA stuff is 24 24 hours like a sedation of midship and on and Eve so I got promoted to the IP team is what they call the NSA so I was working with the global global management for NSA I managed Cisco stuff all over the I know it's pretty dope because it was Oh crazy Cisco Network you know it was dope because I had my CC and P but I didn't I I was a paper ccnp and how many uh people he might like paper certs they

just studied and do that but what I found is if you get the paper then you get moved into positions I didn't have a clue what I was doing I remember one time we had like it was a site located in the continental US I probably shouldn't tell what a site said but this site I had a buddy from an Air Force just transferred to this site and it was so funny because my first couple weeks on the job I showed us I shut a router down and that's Phil site so this NSA field site was totally cut off from Earth and so uh luckily you had a buddy there to tell him a can you can you

reboot that router for me so my buddy like blown reboot the router the sites back online but another thing is if you're not if you're not failing because there's a lot of people talk all the time about how they all they do is win win win you sort of gut well who did the win who's that who's win win win is that that's a DJ coward or something right so people that's a lot if people aren't felling they're not trying you know so so and additionally it's good to have a paper search to get you in a position so whatever certain you're gonna get good at these certs don't make you the experience I think once you get in is

gonna make you who you are so like I said I think two of these certs are still active even but I don't put certs on my LinkedIn and I'm not hating on people to do I think I have the CH and security plus I think they're evergreen and they don't expire but I had CC RSS see RSS feed that expired too loudly so anyway that's that's how and I'm gonna tell you how how to kill these these are these things as well so all right so let's talk about and another thing that I did really well I took all the search there was all paper certs again they got me in a position that I was able to

exceed also I did my I did my bachelor's degree from Excelsior College and I don't know if you have heard excelsior before but you can you can look it up I don't know where you are in your education journey some people believe they have to have a I don't believe you have to have a degree personally my son my stairs my wife or in the front row our son my son started working for rapid7 when he was 16 years old on an internship and he started working full-time when he was 17 now he I think he's in line for a promotion to senior software engineer or something like that rapid7 so he's been so I tried these tips on my real life

son we always called him our use our experiment the first one so it'd have been a cool experiment because he's off making good money coding my son is the best Ruby developer I know and I know a lot of Ruby developers so so the stuff I'm telling you it works I've tried it on my son I've tried it on peers I've tried it on people that I know people that were transitioning out to the military people are trying to break into the career this stuff works so I've got 13 more minutes and this is gonna be action-packed so let's do this so clip club tests are like a pee test if you never heard them before

clip this or like a pee test in high school you can take an advanced course in it in you take a test and it's worth three college credits most people don't know that there's like an exact number but I would say there's probably more than 40 or 50 of these tests and that might be on the low side if you're in the u.s. most colleges take these because they're credited by the American Council on Education they're the same people that give credits for any class you took at a traditional college three credits and some of the tests are it's six credits so if you like we're like a lot of people I mean man I did three and

a half years of college or something like that I see people like that all the time or I did a year and a half and I and I almost had my associates I've met people like that a lot and I say hey man you should check out clips you could probably test out on a couple of classes and finish your degree so I became so good at this that I used the combination of the three tests that you see up here DSST is another one is there's like 30-something tests DSST and Excel to your college exams I tested out of a hundred and fifteen college credits so 115 college credits you only need 120 for most degree programs so I I pretty

much I still people I did the Abraham Lincoln school of college I was kind of like self-taught because I'm apt out to curriculum I study to test and I'm gonna show you exactly how I passed all those tests because I think it's like you know I don't know if everybody can do it but I can guarantee you even if your kids did it you would save a lot of money on your kids going to college alright so that's so that's about the test by examination so I got my undergrad from Excelsior College the reason why I went there is because that kaulitz anybody know excelsior in-house anybody an alum from Excelsior undergrad excels here this was

cool because they had no transfer or residency requirements a lot of people take classes here and there especially in the military and they have no words that go to confirm their degree because a lot of colleges say you have to have 15 upper level from here and 45 you can only transfer this crap in this carrot so that sucks because you might be totally out of state the online program doesn't work well with so sure they don't have any residency requirements and it's completely regionally accredited so I accelerate accredited like by the same field with Syracuse Duke whatever North Carolina is accredited by the same accrediting body so that's pretty dope so my so I then I

went and did a master's degree in uh from Capitol it was Capitol College back in the day they just rebranded it's a capital technology University so did a master's degree from there and what's cool about all this is I pay $0 paid a total of two thousand dollars and I have a master's degree and that's pretty dope because a lot of people I know are like are still paying off college debt that college that will write TJ we fun enough TJ's like I want to hack any mayor who when it's a Libre Sally buddy so you are told teacher you can only use your hacking skills pretty good so the dark side the dark side has cookies and jail

time all right so another hack that I do in my life and and and you can do this as well is I do audible a lot so over the last five years and this is totally by accident a couple of things I didn't have a plan but over the last five years because I'm an auditory learner so you got to figure out your your learning technique some people are learning hands-on some people aren't listening whatever right so whatever that way is you can you can like totally win so I'm dead of 120 some books over the last five years and like a lot of people don't do that kind I said that's like a big

library but I just listened to it online I mean what article and I just learned learn learn learn all the time sometimes I get addicted and I'll do like five books in a week and then I'll lay off and then if I something else I learn so now it's an entrepreneur what I really want to learn it sells so all I do is listen to sales material I listen to the best salespeople I can get so I'm always looking for sales books of any all sales guys in here let me know so this book is super relevant this is a book that I'm recommending everybody because it's definitely related to that career so if you go to I just came back from blackhat

everybody's talking about our artificial intelligence in a machine learning so this book called on intelligence it's about Jeff Hawkins Jeff Hawkins and this is cool for just knowing your stuff because when people try to bring in AI a machine learning you can actually speak the language in vernacular so this book about Jeff Hawkins Jeff Hawkins is pretty phenomenal guy he invented the Palm Pilot he has a degree in neuroscience and computer science and what he does is he compares the human brain it's a machine learning in a it's an absolutely phenomenal read and if you're struggling to understand yeah our recommend this book so this is about hacking a career how do you know what's

bullcrap and what's not I hate food our actual motto at our company is something like you know I we exist to eliminate fear uncertainty and up so this book is dope check it out this is just for your career alright so here's how to study for any of the things that we talked about for here's are all certifications so this is a sample DSST outline this is the and some people refer to it as Dante's right every test that you ever want to do in life if you did its SAT or a CT it gives you percentages of what an examination is going to be on and even what kind of problems so some people

study these things blindly I don't understand that because like there is a way in the military they kind of told you what was on exam and you kind of you did exam so all these tests they tell you percentages of how this is like from our criminal justice DSST all right so if somebody's so many people here maybe law enforcement a lot of people transition law enforcement to cyber and I don't know sometimes they have a degree or not but these tests are different from any other tests all the credit by examinations they judge you essentially on what would a student if they were studying the same course what would their uh how much would they

remember after like eight months or something it's some kind of scientific thing because everything you do you only remember a certain month semana you're not gonna remember anything from this talk hopefully take one note about it so you're only gonna remember 20% of what what you learned in any given thing so here you're not judged on 25% of the class you're judged on 25% essentially like what what was that person that studied it no at that point so I would say if I saw some fifteen percent and somewhat twenty five percent of the test I'm studying 25 percent 25 percent 25 percent I'm gonna know that stuff inside out and I'm gonna know peripheral information but even nowadays I did all

this without Wikipedia you can go to Wikipedia and build you a study guide based on this like definitional Cranham but a lot put it in a Wikipedia put it in Google like it's like super easy to build your own study guides to this material we read the material and your and your and your here it's like a you have to get less than 50% on these tests to get college credit it's ridiculous right so anybody in military I know there's a couple military people in here you got to take advantage of that the clips are free from military personnel is insane so that's why I did it 115 credits for zero dollars so here's the state materials are used on that so

I cliff notes funny enough cliff notes has the official outline for many of these things it since ASA credit it is these tests they actually tell you like this is what's required when they look at North Carolina or Duke their classes have to follow this same syllabus in order to grant college credits so if you read the cliff notes you're going to be super close to that I read it's this other thing called standard deviance anybody ever use those before they're really dope because they actually walk you through it and they teach it in like kid like I have to I tell people I'm a dumb country boy so you got to break stuff down to me real simple and they

they break stuff down real simple and tell you and I'm telling you if you have kids you're killing yourself if you don't your kids in high school can take these exams and they're like 100 bucks a pop your kids you can save about thirty thousand dollars I did the calculations you can say about thirty thousand dollars if you got your kids to take like you know ten exams and some of my work six credits so the for dummies series books are amazing you know it's funny because a lot of times when I talk to people I talked to me about civil war and he swear to God did I like a Civil War historian no I just read civil war

for dummies and like I said nowadays we got Wikipedia which is a beast this book right here everybody that complains about information security uh what is called burnout I heard a lot they need to read this book so you know and this book talks this book is the funniest book ever so it has more f-bombs in it than any book I've read in my life especially in the first chapter but what's cool about this book is a it gives people it gives you the ability to concentrate on what really matters and personally what I've learned is like you can probably just concentrate on one thing at a time I see so many people coming in

cybersecurity and they want to know everything I tell people you good if you know one thing well in cybersecurity and you could build a whole career on learning something better than anybody else so I think it's cool it's experiment and listen and learn from the talks but even if people up here talking stage they're probably only good in one thing you know if you ask somebody they might tell you I'm not good at nothing so but but focus on what really matters in execute like like like crazy so if that's getting the college the green just focus on that just throw everything else to decide if it's getting that certification get that certification and that's how that's kind of how that works

so down to the interview so here's about tips for interviewing only put on your resume when I when I interview somebody I interviewed them only on what's on their resume so if you set yourself up for you set yourself up for failure if you put stuff that you don't know on your resume put everything that you're really good at on your resume and talk about stuff on your resume learn how to do redirection and talk about stuff that you know and every every place is not a good fit you know I you know but I only interview people based on what's on a resume so if they have I'm a diss programmer I ask him

about that so people are asking you outside of outside of that or something like that you probably don't want to work there anyway because what what I found is if people are trying to fit you into some kind of position or whatever no matter who they pick they're not going to know everything required for that job requirement it takes anybody in this room about six months to know what they're doing and by six months you're probably better than everybody on that team and that's kind of that's kind of hot I view these things so Denzel Denzel if you want to be a pen tester this is Denzel in training day he says if you want it if you want to catch a wolf you

got to be a wolf wolves I mean don't be a sheep and filing what everybody sends because probably nobody knows what they're talking about including me don't be a sheep that's the end of my talk thank you very much

so we have a few minutes for some questions anybody got questions from Marcus no questions okay here we go hold on pass the mic so in order to take those tests that you're talking about can you just go online and sign up do you have to go through a university did start the test out of some of those classes or how do you actually do that so it gets counted as college credit yeah yeah so most colleges offer these tests especially most state colleges some private colleges don't do it so a local state college or a or even a Community College probably offer these tests you can probably go to their testing center is where all the college

kids take their tests and you can sound totally signed up online you can download those exam outlines yourself by the books and just go take the test you don't have to be rested to the college typically can you assure the slide of that College where you get your masters from again okay Capital Technology University so that College was totally an online program which is which is a really good program when I was at NSA all NSA had a partnership with that program and they paid for a lot of NSA people to go to their program and when I got off the military I went to their program because all my heroes kind of you know

people I looked up to 130 college so it's right down a rope NSA about 15 minutes of NSA so that's why I went to that college and it one up here want to prevent sorry just to re-emphasize um to pass certifications just look at the breakdown percentages of where everything's focused on high percentages go for that study that and they're now yeah okay cool thank you so yeah look for look for in also online forums they'll give you some clues as well but but just know know the stuff is the highest percentages like the back of your hand and you'll pass the test you don't have to study everything I figure they're good Thanks that's good thank

you Mark [Applause]