As a high school 12 grader, what is a beginner cybersecurity certification to take?

Career Advice
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As a high school 12 grader, what is a beginner cybersecurity certification to take ?

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Begin with absolute basics, there is too little information provided by you. Being a newbie to CYSEC myself, all I can tell you- is to begin with fundamental concepts of Networking, Operating systems, Linux, and if you haven’t done any basic IT course ever begin with them if you have you are good to go with these.
BEST OF LUCK :+1:

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You’d probably be well served by starting with your network+ and security+. Depending on the environment that you’d like to pursue a career in (government or private industry), a lot of government recognizes CEH and CISSP. I would say CEH would be helpful and more of a “newbie” certification then OSCP. However, I’d recommend studying for and getting hands on with the OSCP. It will get you more bang for your buck in the long run. Oh, and you would likely be well served by getting very familiar with KALI and all the tools provided there-in.

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This issue with CISSP and CEH is that both of these certifications require work experience. Both EC-Council and ISC2 will ask for an employer they can speak with / email to validate work experience. Furthermore the CISSP requires you map 5 years experience to 2 or more of the 8 CISSP domains to further prove experience.

I think the Security+ is a good first certification. I also agree with @majorPathetic that your focus should be on skills first and certs second. Here are two books I think any beginner should have and read:

How Cybersecurity Really Works
https://www.amazon.com/How-Cybersecurity-Really-Works-Hands/dp/1718501285/ref=rvi_sccl_2/135-8226697-8581655?pd_rd_w=uKl8F&content-id=amzn1.sym.f5690a4d-f2bb-45d9-9d1b-736fee412437&pf_rd_p=f5690a4d-f2bb-45d9-9d1b-736fee412437&pf_rd_r=F1BPBH89YA868DJ0Q7X4&pd_rd_wg=o5JqZ&pd_rd_r=2d35c05f-dc0a-4d6b-85f0-84adea574c7b&pd_rd_i=1718501285&psc=1

This book "covers different types of attacks, common tactics used by online adversaries, and defensive strategies you can use to protect yourself. You’ll learn what security professionals do, what an attack looks like from a cybercriminal’s viewpoint, and how to implement sophisticated cybersecurity measures on your own devices.

Cybersecurity Blue Team Toolkit

This book teaches “why and how to use fundamental open source and free tools such as ping, tracert, PuTTY, pathping, sysinternals, NMAP, OpenVAS, Nexpose Community, OSSEC, Hamachi, InSSIDer, Nexpose Community, Wireshark, Solarwinds Kiwi Syslog Server, Metasploit, Burp, Clonezilla and many more.”

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