Certified Network Defender (CND) is a vendor-neutral, instructor-led, hands-on network security certification training program. It is a skills-based, lab-intensive curriculum based on the National Infocomm Competency Framework's (NICF) security education framework and works role task analysis, as well as the National Initiative of Cybersecurity Education's job-task analysis and cybersecurity education framework (NICE). The course has also been mapped to global job roles and to the Department of Defense (DoD) job roles for system/network administrators.

The course teaches network administrators how to determine which components of an organization should be inspected and tested for security vulnerabilities, as well as how to reduce, avoid, and mitigate network risks. CND refers to the network protection, detection, response, and prediction strategy.