It’s rare to hear of a ransomware-related attack that has led to data breaches or devastating impact on businesses and individuals from all sectors. Cyberattacks are becoming more sophisticated, targeting everything from personal health records to credit card data.
The job of a cybersecurity professional is to defend against such attacks by looking for weaknesses and taking preventative steps. To do this successfully, they need certain skills in both technical and non-technical areas.
A cybersecurity professional should be proficient with various platforms and computer systems to stay up-to-date with newest hacking techniques. This includes a working knowledge of programming languages, forensic investigation, and specific tools (e.g. the ones used for digital forensics and penetration testing). For a cybersecurity analyst, for instance must know how IoT devices are connected to the Internet and can be hacked.
It’s also vital for cybersecurity professionals to be competent in identifying, assessing and prioritize risk for their organization. This is because the nearly limitless ways that hackers can cause problems make it impossible to defend against every threat. For example security professionals should be aware that passwords should lengthy, complex and contain the use of upper and lowercase letters, numbers and symbols, and that passwords should not contain personal information such as birthdays or a family member’s name.
To be a go to website successful cybersecurity expert, it’s important to have empathy for both the victims of cyberattacks as well as the perpetrators. This helps them to understand what a cyber-hacker may think. They can then put together more effective defences.