Marcus Chen

Marcus began his career in a Midwestern credit union's two-person SOC, where he learned that ninety-five percent of security work is alert triage and the other five percent is convincing the IT helpdesk to install the patch. After four years there he moved to vulnerability management at a Bay Area fintech, then into senior detection engineering at a series-B SaaS company where his team owns the SIEM rule set today.

He holds the ISC2 CISSP, CompTIA Security+ (SY0-701), CySA+ (CS0-003), PenTest+ (PT0-003), Network+ (N10-009), and the AWS Solutions Architect Associate. He failed Security+ on his first sitting in 2017 because he over-relied on Professor Messer videos and skipped the performance-based questions — the kind of mistake that costs you forty minutes you don't have on exam day. Every CompTIA guide he writes here is shaped by that miss.

On Cert Climb he covers the CompTIA, ISC2, Cisco, and EC-Council certifications. His editorial bar is narrow: if a guide says "memorize this", it's because the exact phrasing appears in the question pool. If it says "skip this", it's because you can lose a week to it and gain two points. He has limited patience for study guides that pad themselves with framework theory you'll never see in the booth.