About Us
Q. What is Learn Security Online?
A. Learn Security Online is the one stop shop for people that are in or trying to get into the computer security industry.
We do this by providing online games, simulators, and courses for beginners or people trying to get into the field. We also offer advanced courses for security professionals as well as a "Security Dashboard" that includes security news, the latest security vulnerabilities, the latest security tools, the latest attacks, popular security blogs, popular security tweets, hack videos, and more.
Q. Who are you guys?
A. Joe McCray (j0e), Chris Gates (CG/chrisg) - and a band of security consultants, technical writers, developers, and customer relationship managers; but mostly just Joe and Chris.
LSO Founder Joe was a government contractor for the U.S. Army for 7 years. During those 7 seven years he served in several information assurance positions ranging from Information Assurance Officer, to Intrusion Analyst, to Information Assurance Network Engineer. After he that was the Security Practice Team Lead for a large network technology company doing penetration testing, developing their Security Assessment Methodology and mapping that assessment methodology to the various compliance standards and regulations (SOX, PCI, HIPAA, GLBA, ISO 27000/27001, FISMA, SAS70, etc). He held basically the same position - running a Professional Services Team at a security product company as well. He is now a freelance Security Trainer, and consultant.
Chris Gates (CG/chrisg), CISSP, GCIH, C|EH, CPTS is the VP of Operations for LSO. Chris started with LSO as a student in 2002 and moved through the ranks as website debugger, technical editor, course betatester, webmaster and eventually became a primary course developer and student mentor. For his day job, he currently works as a penetration tester for a large government contractor. In the past he worked for the US Army as a signal officer and over the years has worked with various satellite communications systems, worked with various deployable communications packages that allowed network connectivity in remote locations, served as a system and network administrator and as an Information Assurance Security Officer. Chris also holds his CompTIA A+, Network+, Security+ Certifications and is a Microsoft Certified Professional (MCP) for Server 2003.
Q. Why do you guys charge for information that you can get for free on the net?
A. (by Joe) A great deal of many people want to learn this stuff in a structured manner from someone with experience in the field. Although I don't consider myself an expert, I do think that I teach this material fairly well, and I do think that the website is one of the best repositories of this type of information on the web so the user doesn't have to sift though hundreds of hacker sites, and live in IRC channels like I did over the years to learn this stuff.
Teaching this material makes me better at, and I love teaching. I'm doing what I LOVE doing, and getting paid for it. It's great. Again - although I don't consider myself to be an expert my time is of value and I do think that I bring something good to the table. People that already know this stuff, or are used to digging this stuff up on hacker sites and IRC are more than welcome to keep doing what they are doing. That's their choice what they do with their money and their time. I can only respect that. Every person in the world doesn't have to be MY customer, and honestly if I was providing a bad product or service I wouldn't get any repeat business - so as long as someone likes what I'm doing I'll keep teaching. Hope this answers your question.
Q. Why don't you guys offer "LSO Certifications" like Other-Security Companies?
A. The whole validity of certification argument aside, we feel its important to, if you want training for a certification, to train you for industry recognized certifications and not just make up our own. The training you receive and the skills you have at the end of the training are much more important than any piece of paper we or anyone else can offer you.
