By James Smith | 12 April 2021
It is important that students seeking employment in cybersecurity choose a specific area of the sector that interests them before they start their career journey. Yes, cybersecurity is that vast and intricate.
This was the advice shared by Vinit Sinha, Director, Cyber Security SME at Mastercard, during the first session of the IT Job Pathway Webinar Series, hosted by Australian Technical and Management College (ATMC) and Employability.life
Vinit and Employability.life mastercoach, software engineering and cybersecurity expert Joshua Stroup were on hand to offer webinar participants important advice on how to pursue a career in cybersecurity.
“Today, there are a number of domains within cybersecurity – incident handling, threat intelligence, android security, web application security … just to mention a few,” Vinit shared.
“If you’re looking to get into a career in IT from a cybersecurity standpoint, you have to decide where you want to be, because there are specific certifications within these different domains.
“For example, if you have an interest in ethical hacking, how do you want to evolve your career? Do you only want to concentrate on a specific area of ethical hacking which focusses just on the web application side of things, or do you want to enlarge your portfolio by also looking at areas such as mobile computing?
“Or maybe you want to build up your expertise in mobile application security … There are a number of different areas. You have to decide which areas you want to be skilled and confident in.”
Joshua Stroup (left) and Vinit Sinha were our special guests for the first instalment of our four-part IT Job Pathway Webinar Series.
Joshua Stroup’s session featured a fascinating insight into the beginnings of this thing we call “cybersecurity”. “Data is now everything – you have a physical life and a digital life … data is everywhere,” Joshua shared. “Data is a gold standard of everything; your credit card, your debts, everything.
“Before cybersecurity we had information security, an industry which targeted specific boundaries of things. As the world quickly evolved into this digital age that we have now, there were new things, and new ways to do these things.
“Data transformed into something that was not just stored, but masses of it were now being moved all over the internet. New questions arose: what happens to the data at rest? What happens to the data in transit? What happens to the data at the receiving end?
“All types of men in the middle began to become involved, which really changed the way data needed to be defended against what are called Advanced Persistent Threats.”
The IT Job Pathway Series continues Thursday, April 15 with a webinar focussing on Cloud Computing. Starting time is 12.30pm IST/5pm AEST. We hope to see you all there!