Note taking

Security people please take notes!

When you study for a certain cert, topic, or just a lab writeup you should take notes, even when in your daily work in your job on a day to day basis. This is because we humans and we forget what we don’t do daily in a routine, and as security people it’s VITAL we take notes because the field is HUGE and we can’t remember every detail or every technique used once in a while in a certain machine or certification exam.

How should you take notes? just write a brief summary of what you did/studied so that when you want to get back to it, reading the two sentences should remind you of the whole thing, in understanding and NOT memorizing. This is important when you are doing almost anything that's new to you in this huge field.

You may be wondering “What is the correct way to take notes?” The answer is simple: “whatever suites YOU”, they are your notes and you are the one who’s gonna refer to them, so do what you like and makes you comfortable when you study or work. Whether studying for the next Pentesting exam, malware analysis, or blue teaming certificate, trust me, take notes :)

There are many note taking apps like Notion, CherryTree, Typora, or notpad if you're a psycho lol, for me I prefer to take my notes in obsidian, simple and straight forward. The way I do is by having a folder for each "Topic" and then that folder will have MD files in it each talking about a certain thing. If that "main" folder can expand to way too much topics then it will expand to folders and those folders to notes etc... think of it like a tree with as much branches as you need it to have.

For example here is a folder about AD from when I studied CPTS and did some machines

You will see I have the name of the module and then sections for each topic, and then in each single note I have sections using headers (i.e ##) and different MD formats, refer to obsidian docs.

And if the topic would have too much branches? For example here I have a folder regarding CDSA and I don't usually do defensive content or labs much so I want it narrowed down in one place, so I make it in sub-folders:

Then whenever I need to read about a certain topic or want a specific command that I forgot, I just use the search function of Obsidian or for extra precision you just use "grep" in Linux.

And that's it for today, take notes people, I can't stress how important and how much it will change your studies.