I have a new course available on Pluralsight. It’s a security analyst focused tools on GNU Bash and scripting. It is the first in a series of courses on Bash.

Scripting for Security with Bash is a technical course for information security analysts that need to understand the UNIX and Linux environment and use Bash as their primary shell and scripting tool. It is designed to be a quick introduction and focused on demonstrating how to use Bash for security operations and automation. (Course overview video)

In addition to understanding the detailed tasks associated with security operations, security analysts need a solid technical foundation. The role requires knowledge of systems that exists in their organization’s IT environment from desktops in offices, servers in far-away data centers, pervasive and distributed operational technology devices, and virtual machines in the cloud. Many of these systems are Linux distributions with installed with the Bash shell.

GNU Bash is the Bourne-Again SHell, which has been the GNU Project’s shell since it was released in 1989. It was designed to replace the Bourne shell, which was released with Version 7 UNIX. Bash is the default shell for most Linux distributions. Scripting in Bash is a common way to automate tasks on UNIX and Linux systems.

My course describes how to use Bash for security operations as a security analyst. I also show how to configure file permissions and ACLs, manage users and groups, use Secure Shell, and handle some security concerns with scripting. The Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) is a Microsoft-supported way to get Linux and Bash on your Windows system, so I show how to install and use WSL. There are seven separate demos included to show how to use Bash. I also included several scripts as examples.

Table of Contents

• Bash Basics
• Using Linux and Bash on Windows
• Managing Security Concerns with Bash
• Managing File Permissions
• Managing Users and Groups
• Running Commands Remotely

Please take a look and let me know your thoughts on this new course.