I personally liked:

"Foundations of Python Network Programming 2nd edition"
"Violent Python"
"Python for Unix & Linux Sys Admins"

"Hacking Secret Ciphers with Python”
http://inventwithpython.com/blog/2013/04/15/hacking-secret-ciphers-with-python-released/
it's a recent release but terrific book on basic cryptography coding. it's GPLv3 licensed, free to share.

for the price, "SPSE" isnt that bad as I heard from people who took it

Part of learning programming is to read others code & write your own code. practice, practice.
Get on "Github", there are chunks of well written networking, pen testing scripts & tools of all levels.
search well, download, play around.

recordMyDesktop works well for me and it is free.

http://recordmydesktop.sourceforge.net/about.php

if you are on Ubuntu/Debian,
sudo apt-get install recordmydesktop

nice collection

An interesting counter to this report:
http://www.businessinsider.com/mandiant-china-report-questioned-2013-2

My point being, why is that China is pushed into the lime light when ever it comes to any incident involving cyber espionage? I mean they are not the only actors involved, there are other actors like Israel, Russia and USA itself doing the same stuff(allegedly).

The Metasploitable & De-ice focuses on network-layer and application vulnerabilities.

In your case, what you are looking at is Web apps vulnerabilities, some test beds could be found here:
http://blog.taddong.com/2011/10/hacking-vulnerable-web-applications.html

take a look at this interesting SQLi primer:
https://www.youtube.com/user/dhakkan3

OWASP testing guide is a right place to start with testing web apps.
https://owasp.org/images/5/56/OWASP_Testing_Guide_v3.pdf

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/book.html

A statement by Ross Anderson that I found interesting is, "When I wrote the first edition, we put the chapters online free after four years and found that this boosted sales of the paper edition."
Sounds like a good idea.

Open Security Training is like gold given for free but sadly the videos are wayyy tooo gigantic and the classes are in Assembly.

I know how it is in India. You have enough time to make up your mind.

I am not the right guy to suggest you about Masters.

If you are really keen on doing a cert, I'd suggest you not to go for CEH, Do something like Elearsecurity or OSCP. There are numerous threads that talk about skills needed for this courses, most of these skills you'd have covered in B'Tech.

As far as programming is concerned, try to learn Python, as there are numerous resources available from where you can learn Python, and books like "Violent Python" and focused on Python for Pen Testing.

For CCNA, you can just do it on your own pace, Packet Tracer would be enough to prepare for CCNA. If you are in B'Lore, go to S.P Road where you can find loads of Networking stuff being sold for super cheap price.

My advice: Take your time & Make ur decision, think about all the possibilities.

That is all the Cipher text thats given .  

btw it's not Vigenere cipher or one time pad.

I participated in NullCon CTF two days ago, it went better than expected.
There was a cryptography question which carried least score among all but it was solved only by veryyyy few people, I couldn't solve it. I thought maybe it's an interesting question discuss.

CipherText: Qssdsctes?dsspeouiuctiiouo



Hint: 144122251532418, Another Interesting Hint: Interesting variant was used in the war between the states

Hey, take a look at the "Open Security Training" courses, esp. "Into to Software Exploits" by Corey K., thats a good place to start.

http://opensecuritytraining.info/IntroductionToSoftwareExploits.html

I have a file, basically it's a small text file which has been created and modified on one Linux system and  copied on to my machine. I would like to know how can I retrive the time stamps of the file for the events that happened in the former OS. is it possible to trace the old time stamps on my machine or should I have access to the first machine, in both cases which tools can I use. I tried 'stat', 'ls' which doesn't provide much details.

Thanks for all the answers.
Tac worked like charm!!
I ended up writing a small python script that could invert the word list. 'split' does a good job in breaking down a large dictionary into small chunks.

I have been trying to crack WPA using aircrack-ng dictionary based attack. I have a huge word list and I'd like to know if there is a way to start from bottom of the wordlist, like starting with last word in file to the first. Is there any tool or technique that will let me create a copy of the same dictionary but in reverse order.
(And I do own the access point I am trying to gain access into. This question is just out of curiosity because I couldn't finish entire dictionary in one go, it stopped at around 90%, it'd be better to start from bottom).

I don't know how many of you guys noticed, this site has been circling on twitter recently, it made me laugh hard 

http://securityreactions.tumblr.com/