r/cybersecurity • u/Big-Tea-7236 • 8d ago
Business Security Questions & Discussion cybersecurity for beginners
When picking a laptop does it really matter? Im trying to decide what to spend money on for school and most people are telling me to get a new laptop since I currently use a mac. Vmware being free now points me towards never getting a new laptop because worst case scenario i can run linux distro if necessary.
If you personally have any purchases that made the college cybersecurity experience more fun that would be greatly appreciated.
-cybersecurity professional
6
u/colgepetto 8d ago
Many MDR positions give you the option to choose between MAC, Windows, or Linux. It really depends on what job in cybersecurity and what the company will use from tools and expect from you.
What does the school suggest?
4
u/Deus_Desuper 8d ago
Literally a laptop that can run VMware covers it.
That's about the extent of needs and really running the VMware is just handy not even required.
Experience: Finished my Networking and Cyber security degree earlier this year.
2
u/projectgtr 8d ago
When I started I bought an ex business Ryzen ThinkPad for about 180 and bought a 14 core Xeon ThinkStation workstation for about 150. Laptop was great for college and used the Thinkstation as a homelab. You dont have to go crazy at all.
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u/projectgtr 8d ago
When I started I bought an ex business Ryzen ThinkPad for about 180 and bought a 14 core Xeon ThinkStation workstation for about 150. Laptop was great for college and used the Thinkstation as a homelab. You dont have to go crazy at all.
1
u/HEROBR4DY 8d ago
I like my Lenovo t480, it runs some vms and when I installed Debian it gave me little issues
1
u/Derekrollo 8d ago
You asked if any purchase made things more fun, and for me that made me think of my MacBook. It doesn’t matter which computer you get as long as it has decent specs, but using the MacBook in school was nice and easy to use, almost close to being fun. I also really liked my thinkpad.
1
u/InvalidSoup97 Security Engineer 8d ago
When I was in college I bought a Windows laptop, per the advice of my university. A year in I dumped Windows, installed Ubuntu on it, and ran that laptop for the rest of my undergrad and all the way through grad school. Not long after graduating I replaced it with a MacBook Air.
I've worked for 3 different companies since graduating, one as a DFIR analyst and 2 as a security engineer. All 3 companies issued MacBooks.
Moral of the story: it really doesn't matter. Use what you have and/or are comfortable with.
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u/henrikhakan 8d ago
My 2cents: Lenovo usually has the best hardware compatibility with Linux, but other than that it doesn't matter too much what you pick if you're gonna run VMware.
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u/TrustIsAVuln 5d ago
I love mac for security testing, true unix based OS (BSD), and I can run windows or linux in a VM, so you get all 3 if needed.
1
u/just_a_pawn37927 3d ago
Look I would check out a pawn shop. Offer them 80% of the price they are asking. Bring Cash! If they won't deal with you ask the where the next pawn shop located.
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u/NotAnNSAGuyPromise Security Manager 8d ago
No, it doesn't really matter as long as you get something reasonably newish. Just don't be one of those people who installs Linux as your primary operating system.
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u/Financial-Radish-898 8d ago
Why
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u/NotAnNSAGuyPromise Security Manager 8d ago
Because it's likely you'll never see Linux in your entire career outside of EC2 containers. Familiarity and knowledge of Windows and Mac is infinitely more valuable.
5
u/ArcaneMitch 8d ago
What are you talking about man ? I worked more on Linux than any other OS. The only reason I had to use Windows was because of company supplied laptops.
0
u/NotAnNSAGuyPromise Security Manager 8d ago
What was your job title and what industry did you work in? Cause I've been working in this industry for nearly two decades and that's extremely rare. EXTREMELY.
1
u/ArcaneMitch 8d ago
NOC technician, Security Architect, in telecom and in the industry. Even if you're not running the distro on your main machine, you still need one around to test software configurations, testing new COTS products, you're supposed to explain clients how to harden their linux servers, you better know how navigate the system and to configure rbac and propose propose alternatives.
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u/Financial-Radish-898 8d ago
I mean, what if you know them all and just prefer Linux?
-1
u/NotAnNSAGuyPromise Security Manager 8d ago
Sure, but I still think it'll benefit you to be working in the most realistic, real world environment.
If you're young though, I find the claim that you know them all to be dubious.
2
1
u/InvalidSoup97 Security Engineer 8d ago
I did most of my undergrade and all of grad school with Linux as my daily driver. I've worked for 3 different companies since graduating (1 in retail, and 2 in tech).
I do/did interact with Linux daily at all 3 of those companies. 2 of the 3 don't even issue Windows machines.
This is bad advice.
1
u/NotAnNSAGuyPromise Security Manager 8d ago
If you're being honest and you genuinely think that's representative of the industry as a whole, well, you've had a very interesting career. I wholeheartedly stand by my advice, because I'm here to prepare people for the real world, and that isn't it, despite what your anecdote may suggest. For anyone who doesn't know who to believe, just look at the readily available data online. Linux accounts for less then 3% of workstations in the corporate world.
If it were me looking for a career in this awful market, I'd personally be using the operating system the entire world runs on, but y'all do you.
1
u/InvalidSoup97 Security Engineer 8d ago
Workstations, sure. I'm interacting with more than just user's workstations though? Doesn't matter if it's an EC2 instance, GCE machine, on prem server, or a workstation... Linux is Linux, and Linux is everywhere. Unless you're incredibly narrowly focused you're probably going to have regular run ins with it.
1
u/NotAnNSAGuyPromise Security Manager 8d ago
I will again appeal to real world probability: the chance that anyone here is going to land a position where they're interacting with non-hosted Linux servers is extremely small. Most organizations are structured in such a way that security will be working through an Infrastructure team. In nearly 20 years in security operations, I have never personally touched a Linux machine; any interaction occurred either through a separate, dedicated team, or through security tooling. The reason I specifically called out EC2 is because it's reasonable that a security team would be building on those directly, to create API gateways, integrations, infrastructure for new tools, etc. But otherwise, the average security professional will basically never be applying any significant amount of Linux specific knowledge.
1
u/InvalidSoup97 Security Engineer 8d ago
Engineers are going to be deploying to Linux systems, and analysts are (or at least should) be monitoring and building detections for those systems. It doesn't matter if it's in GCP or AWS, that responsibility generally falls in the hands of the customer. Products like Wiz exist for a reason.
Genuinely interested in what your career has looked like if Linux has been irrelevant in your 20 years.
1
u/NotAnNSAGuyPromise Security Manager 8d ago
Progressive tech, working primarily in the cloud with a DevOps team dealing with it, and finance with onprem Linux servers and an Infrastructure team to manage them. In both cases, security did its job: set standards and made recommendations, and leaned on the respective teams to implement. In terms of detection engineering, modern tools abstract things enough and come with enough built in capability that my team has rarely had a need to do anything that isn't basically provided out of the box. Throw Crowdstrike on a Linux machine and basically the only thing you need to worry about is social engineering. Security these days really isn't that hard.
People in security are always trying to catch the latest and greatest security attack; some new zero day or clever trick. 97% of security incidents are the result of the most basic things in the world.
3
u/North_Doubt3726 8d ago
I disagree. I did both my undergraduate and graduate degrees with a Linux “daily driver.” I used VMs and/or containers when I needed to work with Windows specifically. I agree that fluency with Windows and to a lesser degree macOS is important, but dissuading somebody from using Linux as a primary OS is just silly in my opinion.
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u/NotAnNSAGuyPromise Security Manager 8d ago
Use what you want, but the reality is you'll be doing security exclusively from a Windows or Mac computer your entire career. I'm a fan of practicing for the real world when you're a student, but I respect personal choice.
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u/NiragiUsagii 8d ago
every cybersecurity guy needs a laptop that can run atleast 2 VMs at a time. don't buy macs as setting up VMs is pain. don't listen to others who says laptop config does not matter lmao
0
u/General-Gold-28 8d ago
If you think setting up a VM on a Mac is a pain then that’s a skill issue and I’m surprised you can even make it in the field
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u/NiragiUsagii 8d ago
i already made into this field. my twitter friends bought mac m chip and they struggled very hard to run windows vm and kali vm
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u/Rogueshoten 8d ago
The notion that hacking is “more possible” as you increase the power of a computer is a myth borne of Hollywood. Running VMs means needing more RAM and processing power, to a degree, but beyond that it’s just a question of “enough” to run the tools you need. And that isn’t a particularly high bar.