Security

After months of studying SEC504 material alongside a full-time role in IT security operations at one of Africa’s largest hydroelectric power plants, I passed the GIAC Certified Incident Handler (GCIH) exam. Here’s the honest version of what that process looked like. Why GCIH My day job involves incident handling in an IT environment. Most certification paths in this space either go too broad (Security+) or too deep into a single domain. GCIH sits at exactly the right level — it covers the full incident handling lifecycle from preparation through lessons learned, while also going into attacker techniques, tooling, and network forensics at a depth that’s actually useful on the job. ...

There’s a point every IT professional reaches where the home network becomes an embarrassment. You spend your days designing resilient, segmented, secure infrastructure for clients or employers, then you come home to a single flat network where your smart bulbs live alongside your workstation, your NAS, and your Hi-Fi system. Everything on the same broadcast domain. No segmentation. No visibility. Just trust and hope. That was my situation. This is the story of how I fixed it. ...