My Thoughts on passing the PSAA Certificate
What is PSAA?
PSAA is the acronym of Practical SOC Analyst Asociate certificate, a associate-level certification in security operations and incident response done by TCM Security. It is mainly focused on a practical skills, it’s course contains more than 30h of content in video format.
My Thoughts
Recently I passed the exam of PSAA! It’s my first cybersecurity related certification so I don’t have much experience in other similar courses, but right now I’m also doing the Security Analyst Level 1 (SAL1) certificate course by TryHackMe so it can give me a bit more context.
I really liked the course, I already have a strong background in Computer Engineering so it made things easier I think. However I liked how everything it’s explained by the teacher of the course Andrew Prince, I consider that the content it’s really useful and also it’s well explained.
The videos of the course provide a theoretical content and also hands-on practice to follow along so you can understand how thing are done and why, the course also provide some CTF to practice your skills learned.
In my case I also did a big part of the SAL1 course that it also gived me more theoretical content and also more practice, not only that I also did some more CTF in HTB, Cyberdefenders and THM of easy and medium level before taking the exam, which gived me even more practice for the exam.
The course it good, however I think that It could be improved with just one video explaining a little bit how a report works, just to know what to expect on the exam, this was my little fear before taking the exam, once there is not that much of a concern, but I would appreciate a lesson of writing a professional report more in depth.
The Exam
The exam is focused on writing a report, divided by each of the incidents to investigate. They will provide you some incidents, context and tools to do your investigation. The course already provides you the knowledge you need in order to pass the exam, however I prefered to do more practice before it to solve the questions for each incident. You have two days with access to the environment to solve the questions and another two to write the report.
Conclusion
Im very happy with the certificate only because I did pass the exam, but because the knowledge I have adquired from the course I think it is very useful as a starting point, I highly recommend it, for me at least its been a great knowledge base to start and get more into blue team cybersecurity.
My next step is going to be to continue my learning path obtaining the SAL1 certificate of TryHackMe.
My PSAA certificate: PSAA certificate