Note: At the beginning of this post I am going to go over a bit of prelude. Please skip to the following section if you are only interested in the Cybersecurity part.
In my last post, I briefly went over an epiphany I experienced recently. It had led me to contemplate my ambitions. But I must confess that there are more factors to this than just the quote from Netflix's CEO. Recently, my home country is going through some political upheaval. While it is far from over, at the peak of its intensity I grew concerned for the wellbeing of my family. Sentimentally, I am quite detached from Bangladesh. Its people suffer from some of the worst mentalities along with economic depravity. There is a complete lack of respect for people, their autonomy and everything in between. But living away from some of its worst representatives had instilled a bit of love in me for the people who have grown up in the same cultural landscape as me. Thus, it had filled me with a sense of powerlessness when I could do nothing more than to draw people’s attention to the complete disregard of basic human rights that had then plagued our part of the world.
Furthermore, I grew appalled by the effect social media was having on my friends. They were caught up in this perpetual hate cycle and negativity. One of my friends even pointed a finger at me for something that I had inadvertently done and found myself being called names. I have since deactivated said platform and started questioning the pursuit of working for giants that care for nothing more than their bottom lines.
Why Cybersecurity
Since the time I first remember laying eyes on a computer, at a tender age while visiting my cousins, I have entertained many interests related to them. I had taught myself Python in high school in the hopes of building sentient machines. And then I found myself building websites for money while dabbling into Backend, Blockchain and Data Science. For this entire time, I had thought of Security as some arcane concept meant only for the most elite of the computer geniuses. I believe the notion was ingrained in me by my engineering school coaching teacher. He used to describe the complex matrix operations and other mathematics a hacker must perform. Yet, I could hardly call myself a competent software engineer without protecting the code I produce from various attack vectors. SQL Ingestion, Cross Site Request Forgery, Cross Site Scripting, Distributed Denial-of-Service etc are all concepts that we need to be familiar with. Granted that these maybe the most premitive of exploits that a competent hacker could think of, is the notion of a practice being hard an excuse for not perusing it? In the advent of the Crowdstrike incident, the world finds itself more exposed than ever. Fortunately, the piece of code that broke the world was meant to protect its users. What if it had more malicious intent? How prepared is the rapidly shifting world of technology for the growing threat of cyber attacks? The industry is seeing rapid growth yet employers still struggle to find candidates. While people worldwide are becoming increasingly dependent on software and systems, I find it a worthy pursuit to protect ourselves against bad actors threatening to steal our data, privacy and peace. I would like to think that even at the worst of these companies, that only care for their bottom line, the pursuit of Cybersecurity could be righteous and fulfilling.
Me doing something with a router some years ago
Evaluating Cybersecurity as a Career
At the time of my last post, I only knew that there needs to be a change but had no clue what that change might look like. The podcasts I listened to were going into the Cybersecurity job market in light of the Crowdstrike incident so I had it at the back of my mind. At a seemingly unrelated meetup however, I so happen to stumble onto a Cybersecurity professional. This is why I love interacting with the community so much. People seem to care a lot. Not only for themselves and their careers but for the betterment of the community in general. I do not know which other professions meet up after work to talk about more work. But having talked with an industry professional, I found many of my questions answered. He encouraged me in many ways and offered useful guidelines. He went over certifications like CISSP and CEH and how he saw the job market to be lacking in talent yet highly rewarding. I was also able to talk to the CISO at my own company about his role and interests. Furthermore, I speed ran the Google Foundations of Cybersecurity course and some carefully chosen YouTube videos on this topic. At this point in time I feel highly optimistic about Cybersecurity as a career. I would like to complete some projects from Freecodecamp and learn more topics form HTB Academy as well as interact with more people from the community to better understand the different roles and people’s career trajectory. At the end of the day, even if I find myself not pivoting to Cybersecurity as a career I would have gained many friends and insights which would be, never-the-less, worth it.
In my last post I had asked myself a question. Here is the tentative answer. In his series You Are Here, Oliver Burkeman asks us to find our "Life Task", which lies at the edge of our comfort zones. I find that pursuing a career in Cybersecurity is what life is asking of me at this point in time.
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