Home of the "Alpha Geek," Mike Meyers, bestselling author of the CompTIA A+, Network+, Tech+, and Security+ Certification Guides.
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08/26/2026
Security+ assumes you already understand firewalls and network segmentation. CySA+ assumes you can read a packet capture without help. Neither certification stops to re-teach you how networks actually work underneath all of that, that foundational work is exactly what Network+ is built to give you first.
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Think about how many times a day you type a web address instead of memorizing an IP number. That convenience is DNS, and understanding how it works is one of the first things Network+ teaches you, and one of the last things advanced certifications ever explain again.
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08/24/2026
There is a reason instructors keep coming back to the OSI model. It is not exam trivia, it is the mental map you use every time you troubleshoot a network problem, tune a firewall rule, or figure out where a security control actually lives on the network.
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08/21/2026
This weekend, turn one of your recurring tasks into a reusable AI workflow instead of starting from scratch every time. Then ask yourself what you would want to know about how that data is handled. That second question is where AI security careers start.
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AI systems learn from data instead of following fixed instructions, and that training data is now part of the attack surface. Here is exactly how a model gets quietly taught to let the wrong thing through.
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08/19/2026
You cannot test your way to a security guarantee with AI the way you can with ordinary software. There is no line of code to point to when something goes wrong, only patterns learned from data.
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Most people use AI for the basics: drafting an email, summarizing a PDF, cleaning up a document. That is a fine start, but it undersells what is actually available once you learn to work with it differently.
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08/17/2026
You probably used AI at work this week without thinking twice about it, drafting an email, summarizing a document, cleaning up notes. That is a fine start, but it is only a fraction of what these tools can actually do for your daily work.
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08/14/2026
This weekend's challenge: could you explain how to secure an AI system if a hiring manager asked you right now? AI security is the fastest growing specialty in cybersecurity, and most security pros haven't been tested on it yet. See if you can answer these questions.
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AI and machine learning security job postings grew 112% in just three years, more than double the growth rate of cloud security. Here's what that growth actually means for security professionals who get certified now instead of waiting until later.
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