CISSP 2021: What’s New and How to Prepare? Let’s look at the significant changes made to the CISSP Official Exam Outline (the course syllabus).
What You Can Learn
What’s new in the CISSP Curriculum, from May 1st, 2021 (next update in 2024)
There are still Eight Domains – D1, D3 & D7 are still broader in content than others.
Very small changes (+/-1%) to the weighting of two domains.
Notable changes to all domains, except D1.
As of late 2019, some of the changes were Already in Official Course (AOC), i.e. the Student (course) Guide; Study Guide; and Official Practice Tests.
D2: Resource types and data activities listed (AOC);
D3: Fourteen designs/solutions listed (50% AOC); and thirteen cryptanalytic attacks listed (some AOC);
D4: Lists several new network architectures;
D5: Additions to all existing sub-domains & new 5.6 on authentications systems;
D6: More detail on security test output and reporting;
D7: Minor changes to 6/15 sub-domains; and
D8: More detail added to all sub-domains.
Who is this Course for?
Students wishing to become Certified Information Systems Security Professionals.
Are there any Prerequisites?
I designed this course to help students prepare for the current (2021-2024) version of the CISSP Exam. It does not replace the official ISC2 course materials, but it will help you get the most out of them.
CISSP 2021: What’s New?
I’ve just passed the new version of the CISSP Exam, and I created this Course to help you pass as well!
This course describes the changes to the Certified Information Systems Security Professional Exam Outline. Now, CISSP has been around for quite some time and the previous version of the course syllabus was established in April 2018. In 2021, ISC2 updated the Exam Outline significantly. In this course, I’m going to go through all of that material for you and show you what has changed, in detail, to help you with your revision.
Here, I give you an overview of what’s changed and how this material has been developed for you.
In the course, we’re going to cover all eight domains from ‘Security and Risk Management’ all the way through to ‘Software Development Security. The CISSP is a very broad course and it covers all sorts of things like physical security and fire prevention right through to some more detailed technical stuff on the workings of the Internet, software development, and security testing as well.
There have been significant changes to all of those domains except one. (There’s a small change to number one, as we will see, but it’s not huge.) However, Domains 2 to 8 have all gone undergone significant changes. (Some of those changes were already in the official course material, in the study guide and some were already in the official practice tests; we will cover that too.)
Course Creation
Also, I wanted to let you know what I’ve done to create this course.
I went on the official five-day course, which cost about $2,500 (US), where we went through hundreds of slides per day. You get a course guide with it, which is 800-pages long. There is a lot of good material in there, an awful lot to learn. In addition, I’ve also been through the official study guide, which is 1,000 pages and contains quite a lot of material that wasn’t in the official course.
Then there is the CISSP glossary, which is about 50 pages and that’s got over 400 definitions in. (The glossary is not so much use. It seems to be quite out of date to me. There are a lot of definitions that you don’t need and quite a few that you do need that are missing.)
The bibliography lists 50+ references for you to read. You shouldn’t have to read 50+ books and standards!
Just the first two are 1,800 pages long. So it’s an enormous hill to climb without some guidance to help you where to look. I’ve included page numbers for the Official Study Guide – where it covers the material we’re going to talk about. However, even the Study Guide doesn’t cover everything – as you will see. So, I’ve been online and looked up the information to get you started.
Links to CISSP 2021: What’s New?
(Learn about my CISSP 2021 Exam Journey here. That course is also FREE.)
