--- fyodor <fyodor@hushmail.com> wrote: As a side note for John, who's aggressively advertising for the CISA Cert, precisely convince me why I should take a white hat tailored course. Instead of,lets say, attend one of those Black hat Cons where they teach far beyond what you will get in CISA!!! ~~~~~~~~~~~0000~~~~~~ fyodor@hushmail.com, CISA,CISM, CISSP, CCSP, ITIL, CoBIT and many others can indeed present challenges to prospective security candidates. What to chose? what to leave? etc. I wouldnt say one is better than the other, because they all have their unique objectives that they try to address in the ICT security market. Its like asking whether a heart surgeon is preferred to a Brain surgeon or to a Physiotherapist or to an Optician. They are all medical practitioners with unique skills that presumes a common undertanding of medicine. So it is with all these Security Certifications, they all offer a common security foundation but with various tangents depending on whether you want to drill down to the 'hands-on' or keep an overall birds-eye view of the IS security status of an organisation. I cannot speak for the other Certifications but for CISA/SM track of certification, they focus on the overall security view of the organisation, sort of the architectural blue-print view of the security status. From this perspective, the CISM/SA holder will actually see the need to hire the hands-on or drill-down hacker-type of techie to seal any technology specific security issues (e.g what a Cisco Certified Security Professionals, CCSP would do)... This is not to imply that CCSP is therefore weaker or cheaper than CISM/SA since the CCSP will have the perrogative to charge an arm and a leg for her skills when called upon by the CISM/SA to provide her services.... Bottom line of the real value of the certification will eventually be dictated by the domestic market conditions i.e. what are the appropriate number of CISMs, CISAs, CCSPs etc that can be absorbed by the Kenyan ICT Security market annually? If we have too many of each, then automatically organisations will begin paying peanuts for their respective services. walu. ____________________________________________________________________________________ Never miss a thing. Make Yahoo your home page. http://www.yahoo.com/r/hs