Hack Your Way In (The Right Way): Andrew’s 5 Tips for Cyber Career Starters
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Focus on the basics early in your career
It can be exciting to leapfrog and start digging into an intrusion or tearing a piece of malware apart. Still, you're going to come to an event where you need to understand the basics of an operating system (OS) or network stack function. That's not the time to be trying to figure out how a TCP handshake works, how the HTTP header looks, or how DLLs are loaded.
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You're going to come to an event where you need to understand the basics of an OS or network stack function.
Don't compare yourself to your peers
You bring something to the fight. Just because you can't reverse engineer (RE) the latest obfuscated malware flavor of the week or decode a C2 stream doesn't mean you're not adding value. Cyber is a team sport—find your thing that you can contribute to and start there. You'll grow your knowledge domains with experience, but you have something to offer now. Find that something.
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Cyber is a team sport—find your thing that you can contribute to and start there.
It's got to be a passion
If cyber is your passion now, great; if your passion is to make money to pay your bills, that's also okay as long as your passion drives you. Cyber is amorphous; if chasing it doesn't excite you, it'll be challenging to keep up.
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Cyber is amorphous; if chasing it doesn't excite you, it'll be challenging to keep up.
Build a network
Even if your network starts small with people you work with directly or know from school, that's fine. You'll find that over time, your network will help you overcome technical hurdles, identify opportunities, and navigate all the facets of this landscape – and you can also help them.
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Even if your network starts small with people you work with directly or know from school, that's fine.
Learn how to communicate
It doesn't matter if you're the most talented analyst in the world; if you cannot communicate with your peers and laypeople, you'll have difficulty sharing your knowledge. Learning how to write and speak to different audiences is paramount. Take a writing class and join Toastmasters (or the like). It won't always be fun, but it will pay off.
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Learning how to write and speak to different audiences is paramount.
Andrew Pease is a security researcher and serial open source tinkerer. He started his journey into information security in middle school and has been hooked ever since. Andrew has worked as an incident responder, threat hunter, and intelligence analyst for various public and private entities.
