Security Fundamentals

What is in this deck

With this deck you learn security as a small set of principles and the many ways they are violated: threats, controls, detection and response.

Security is not a list of attacks. It is a small number of principles and a large number of ways they get violated.

100 cards in that order. First the principles: the triad and what each part fails as, least privilege, separation of duties, defence in depth. Then the threats, technical and human, because social engineering is cheaper than an exploit and works more often. Then the controls, including the difference between hashing and encryption that half of all interviews ask about. Then what happens after something goes wrong, which is where preparation shows.

Written from the public body of security practice. No exam objectives are reproduced and no vendor's material is used.

The categories decide what comes up: start with “Continuity” alone and add the rest when you are ready.

What you learn

• The principles, and which one a given attack violates
• Threats from ransomware to tailgating
• Hashing, salting, symmetric and asymmetric encryption
• Detection: SIEM, IDS, EDR and what each one sees
• Incident response in six phases, and evidence handling

The categories

7 categories sort the 100 cards. You can filter by category and take on what is due right now.

1. Continuity
2. Controls
3. Governance
4. Identity
5. Operations
6. Principles
7. Threats

Learning with Qardbox

You see a card, you think, you turn it over and say whether you knew it. A round asks nothing more of you, and how the app works out the next date from that is on the page about FSRS-6.

What sits comes back less often, what wobbles comes back soon. You set a daily goal, and when nothing is due the app tells you exactly that instead of inventing work for you. How a round goes is shown on the learning page.

Everything stays on your device. No account, no sign-up, no ads. After the purchase the deck sits in your library like any other subject and can be studied, reordered and extended just like your own.

What it costs, and what it doesn’t

Qardbox itself costs nothing, and it stays that way. Every function is there from the start, with no subscription, no ads and no tiers; what that rests on is on the page about what it costs.

Your own cards stay unlimited, and decks from friends or from the family you read in without a limit, from a file as well. You do not need this deck in order to learn with Qardbox.

It is a shortcut: 100 checked cards for €0.99, once, with Family Sharing. The work you would otherwise do is already done. The App Store shows the price in your currency.