Network Security

tl;dr - Take IIS and skip this course. IIS is a much better course overall. NS is simply not worth your time or money.

I have a lot to say about this course, but I'd rather keep this short and just hit the highlights. I'll start with the good and say that the TA's are great and helpful. Truly the one good thing about this course. Second, the malware section of this course is better IMO than the one in IIS. I think they should scrap NS, use the malware section from NS for IIS, and call it a day.

I felt NS was a colossal waste of time. I only had to spend about 5 to 6 hours each week to get an A. The material is ancient by cybersecurity standards and references material that was published before I even started working in the industry. This isn't to say that information can't still be correct if it's old, but technology has changed so much since a lot of this course was written that I frequently struggled to find the relevancy.

The projects are a mix between okay and outright terrible. I think the biggest letdown was the ML project. The IIS ML project did feel a little forced into the course, but at least you learned about encodings, training and testing, and fundamentals on how ML works. In this course you get to add some python to a tool that the professor helped author back in 2006! That's it. That's your ML project.

My two cents is this: do not take this course. GATech should seriously consider either reworking this course or scrapping it altogether. It's a waste of students effort and money to have something in a graduate program that I think barely passes as undergraduate.

I highly recommend Advanced Topics in Malware Analysis if that's your thing. Otherwise, just take something else, anything else. AIES was better.

I can't recommend this course. While the intent behind using projects to teach is understandable, the execution feels needlessly time-consuming, and several exercises add little real value. Much of the material relies on outdated practices that don’t reflect current best standards, leaving students to fill in the gaps through their own research. To be fair, I did gain a lot from the course, but I could have achieved the same outcomes without the prolonged frustration of wrestling with the projects. In hindsight, the opportunity cost was significant; that time could’ve been better invested in more meaningful learning.

The projects in this class are very old-school and take far too much time to set up. There were five major projects, weekly quizzes, and an exam, but the workload often felt unnecessarily complicated rather than educational. It is very difficult to understand the instructor, and the TAs are rarely available or willing to help. If you run into issues setting up VMware or dealing with the outdated tools, you’re essentially on your own.

The lectures don’t align well with the assignments, so you end up spending hours searching online just to complete basic tasks. Overall, the class feels disorganized, outdated, and overly stressful for the amount of actual learning you get out of it. This is one of the worst class I have taken, and it should be dropped overall.

Ended with A. The content of the class isn't too difficult. The exams were extremely easy - I stopped watching lectures 1 week in because of how bad they were, instead reading notes I found from past students. I don't think any of the assignments are hard. However, most assignments are ambiguous in what you need to do and are tedious. Would recommend taking it in the summer, pretty light course load, went on multiple week long vacations during the class.

My two main problems with the course were:

• Lecture videos are broken up into a million videos that are 5 seconds long.
• Some VMs would only work with windows and not Mac

I have based my ratings here for difficulty and workload on manual student work excluding AI tools (When class policy excludes them).

TLDR: Take this class if you know what you are getting into and are ready for battle. Curves are generous and an A is absolutely within reach if you're not new to the topic and/or are willing to grind it out.

This class seemed to be harder on me than most. I came in with an almost nonexistent security background and middling general tech exp. For whatever it's worth.

Most of your grade is project work done in modules on provided VMs with instruction sets that were fairly vague. For this cohort, our absolute All-Star of a Head TA (Melissa) made a huge difference. By combing transcripts of office hours, Ed, and the class Discord, I felt MUCH more confident in approaching known sticking points. Also, the grader is mostly transparent if I remember right, which is a huge plus.

Despite the difficulty of the projects themselves, the instructional team was VERY generous with curves and extra credit. So if you want a class specifically on this subject with an emphasis on simulated attack/defense scenarios, I would take it. If you want an easier A, I wouldn't.

I'm just going to leave a few bullet thoughts about this class. I got an A overall, and and am a cybersecurity professional.

• While there is a slight emphases on Network Security, this calls covers a bit of a wider range of security topis at a relatively shallow level. If you don't have any experience in security the class will be relatively helpful intro to security topis with a slight

• Quizzes where open book.

• Projects where 80% of the course grade. If you do them and the quizes it's really hard to not get an A.

• There was 10% extra credit (one exam on extra topics) one easy project (5% each).

• There is not much coding, only one project required large amount of code. All code was JS or Python.

• The projects are mostly self directed, while there are write ups the quality highly varies. Some knowledge in the field or google searches are enough to make up the gaps in my experience.

• Projects varied in length. I spent about 4-8 hr on most with 2 hr of lectures/readings/quiz.

TL;DR Easy A. Interesting projects but only really serves as a intro to various security topics. A decent course if your new to cybersecurity.

This course is a joke and a complete waste of time.

The documentation of the projects is terrible. You will spend more time alt-tabbing between the multiple docs they provide, none of which they created and are instead pulled from other universities like Stanford.

This course is literally a compilation of other people's work, sloppily put together by non-English speaking TAs. And you can expect the same level of "support" when going through the projects. There is nothing to gain from this course, only useless busy work that is far less engaging than Intro to Sec.

To be honest, this course really has me thinking about the quality of education I am receiving from GA Tech and whether or not it is worth it. It is clear that almost no effort went into preparing this course and it has me worried about other courses.

This is my 4th class (maybe last) and I have straight A's. This program may be an entire waste of time, and the only reason I did it is to show people a piece of paper with the word "Master" on it.

I do not feel like a Master after this course.

Long story short, I had a 90% in the end, but after the final Proj 5, I ended up with a C (77.7%)...and that's after getting the 5 extra credit points.

So, yeah, this might be easy if you're really good at coding, but even after the final exam, I was still at an A. Once that final proj rolled through, the TAs decided to point out early on, Proj 5 can be done in like 9-13 hrs, maybe less. No way, not possible for me. I worked on it for days and days and days, way more than 1.5 weeks, sometimes getting like 2 hrs of sleep. Still got a 37/100 on the final project. Know what the problem is? The hardest part worth 60 pts, the last part, is really a go or no-go. I busted my ass on that last part, and no partial credit or anything. So, that very last task in Proj 5 can break you.

Do not sleep on Proj's 2 or 5.