Keep after it, you'll get there 

Keep going, you're very close 

There's still time! Everyone that gets through gets a shot at the drawing, so for anyone that hasn't solved it yet, you still have a chance.   

And it looks like they have mobile phone service back for the time being as well:

http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/218249/mobile_phone_service_restored_in_egypt_for_now.html

The last ISP in Egypt, the one that was providing access to their stock exchange, has now apparently gone down:

http://yro.slashdot.org/story/11/01/31/2340230/Egypt-Goes-Dark-As-Last-ISP-Pulls-Plug

That actually exactly what I was thinking. Unfortunately, I don't think something like lynx can really handle a web page constructed with ajax, flash, javascript, and all that fancy stuff very well. If you could put a translator in the middle so that you were pushing the bare minimum of info over your connection, it might actually be workable. It would be almost like failing back to the state of the web from 10 or 15 years ago.

Wired has a wiki up now called Communicate if Your Government Shuts Off Your Internet

http://howto.wired.com/wiki/Communicate_if_Your_Government_Shuts_Off_Your_Internet

Not much there that's practical over the long term, considering the connection speed that you need to use most of the services on the internet at present. Seems like what you really need is a set of low-bandwidth-friendly proxy services that will strip all of the crap out of your webmail, news sites, forums, etc... so that they're actually usable under conditions like these.

Well, from a certain perspective, I imagine that "some catastrophic cyber attack" might very well include massive protests that were critical of the government, which would certainly have a cyber component. This seems to be the case in Egypt, and I wouldn't discount it happening elsewhere.

I'm quite sure that preventing civil unrest would be plenty of justification for the use of such a tool in the name of public safety.

And they're still down. I'm reasonably sure that they've taken the record now for both length and breadth of outage. I also see conflicting accounts on whether the ISP behind their stock exchange is still up. If that's down long, they'll start doing themselves some serious economic harm here shortly.

There are a whole list of them here:

https://www.isc2.org/credential_waiver/default.aspx

I think the sec+ is likely one of the easiest and cheapest ones on the list to get. It's also important to remember that you can only get one year taken off off the experience requirement, no matter how many degrees, certs, etc... you may have.

The experience requirements are here:

https://www.isc2.org/cissp-professional-experience.aspx

Take a look and see if any of your other experiences fit in. Presuming that you mean sysadmin when you say admin, you can likely justify that for at least a portion of the experience requirement. Most IT-related work has some security aspect to it. You can also email or call them and ask them directly whether your experience will count.

Your degree will likely take a year off, as you said. If they won't accept that, go get the security+ cert, which will definitely do so.

If you just can't get there, you can also look at the SSCP, which has a much lower experience requirement:

https://www.isc2.org/sscp/default.aspx

Thanks guys. Steve and I had a good time writing it and I think we ended up with a pretty solid  book. The global cyber warfare situation is particularly interesting to watch right now.

Tom Wilhelm runs training classes that are based on the mentoring concept and are reasonably priced. You can look them up at http://www.hackingdojo.com/.

The new Cyber Warfare book that I wrote with Steve Winterfeld just went up for presale on Amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/Cyber-Warfare-Techniques-Security-Practitioners/dp/1597496375/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpt_2

It should be out on June 15 

I ended up doing something else since I couldn't find any independent reviews for their classes. Plenty of marketing material on their page, but it struck me a bit odd that there wasn't anyone else taking about them elsewhere.