in reply to From Developer to Security...

I would very much say Perl and IS/IT tie very well together. I'm a Security Analyst for a small firm and code most of the inhouse IDS utillities. From Port Scanner to Network Analyzer and several common network tools like DNS Enumeration and Whois etc. Perl being 100% cross platform ? Lets us use my utillities on every and any machine on our open architecture LAN. There is no reason why you cannot and should not continue to develope in perl and do IS as well. In fact it would be wise to pursue IDS development now while you're gaining IS/IT hands on experience. x1b

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Re: Re: From Developer to Security...
by heusserm (Initiate) on Sep 26, 2003 at 11:55 UTC
    I would very much say Perl and IS/IT tie very well together.

    It really depends on what you are doing in security. Setting up PGP keyrings? Automating FTP processes? Moving from FTP to SSH? Running "Crack" Periodically? -- Or administrating firewalls?

    The first four of these, "Thinking" security jobs, I would think a 2-4 year stint in security could be very good for your career. ESPECIALLY if you want to work in "real IS", not the shrink-wrapped world. If it's an "unthinking" job where you are really a computer operator who runs security software ... run away quickly.

    JMHO. If location is an issue, consider it deeply.

    regards,


    Matthew Heusser,
    heusserm at student dot gvsu dot edu
Re: Re: From Developer to Security...
by DrHyde (Prior) on Sep 26, 2003 at 09:06 UTC
    When I was doing a job that sounds similar to yours, I too re-implemented some tools in perl. With hind sight, I would have just used pre-existing tools, using perl for analysing their reports. Most of the important tools - snort, tripwire etc - are sufficiently cross platform already.

    I think the original poster should be careful, and if he thinks he needs to write some tool from scratch should look very carefully at the options that area already available. His time is probably better spent in understanding the existing tools and writing better analysis tools, rather than re-implementing everything himself.