Cybersecurity: Managing Systems, Conducting Testing, and Investigating Intrusions

CHAPTER 4

Network Administration for Security Professionals

Hands-on knowledge of network administration is an essential prerequisite to becoming an effective cybersecurity professional. Network administration includes the entire lifecycle of systems, from hardware installation to all system changes through to decommissioning.

For security testing, many administrative operations are invoked to enable tests such as network setup, mounting drives, and transferring data. You need to be familiar with a variety of system types and how to work across platforms to be effective. Experience as a network administrator is an important prerequisite to greater responsibilities in cybersecurity.

This chapter covers network administration in a logical chronological manner, similar to a day in a life of a network administrator, including hardware installation, network setup, moving data between systems on networks, and managing disks.

The first steps in network administration are setting up the hardware and cabling. Then you install operating systems and configure system protections, such as firewalls, antivirus utilities, and anti-spyware tools, before you put the system on the network. To complete the building or rebuilding of a new system offline, you need to burn some data CDs from another system with downloaded patches and applications. Installing many applications requires knowledge of compression and archiving.

System management controls enable you to manage users, services, and devices. ...