How to Learn Cybersecurity at Home
You may be looking for a new career and stumbled upon cybersecurity and are all excited about it now! That makes me happy to think about. Its my job now to explain to you how to get started learning cybersecurity at home.
There are a few things that make a well rounded entry level cybersecurity professional. But first let me explain the Security Operations Center Analyst. The SOC Analyst is the gateway to cybersecurity because is it the most junior position that is often available in a company for cybersecurity and the high turnover rate (usually because of promotions out of the SOC) means the position opens up frequently. SOC Analysts usually come from one of these four areas:
And when we say career changers, we are typically meaning from other areas of IT. I am an expert in training for entry level cybersecurity and I promise you, 90% of the time, folks find it easiest to land a SOC analyst job and then pivot to the specialties they are most interested in.
So, now that you know that you need to target a SOC analyst, lets talk about the four areas that make a well rounded SOC analyst.
- High Level Concepts
- Hard Technical Skills
- Business Acumen
- Culture Fit
Culture fit is extremely important, and that's kind of a specialty to me as well. Not that I’m perfect for every company, because I’m most certainly not, but typically since I have spent the last 10 years in a SOC I can speak the language. While not 100% effective, there are ways to maximize your culture fit as a SOC Analyst, but if you want to just be you there's the right place for you, too, just know who you are and what you stand for.
High Level Concepts
The high level concepts everyone should know, not just for cybersecurity experts, but anyone in a professional capacity. Things like what is separation of duties, what is least privilege, and what is the CIA triad? These are fundamentals in cybersecurity and the best place to learn is CompTia’s Security+ Certification. Long standing and well regarded as the minimum standard for entry level cybersecurity. This course is an excellent resource for cost effective training for the high level fundamentals of cybersecurity:
For high level concepts it should be very structured, and maybe even boring, as its the same information we all get and know (and repeat). Any one of Udemy’s courses for Security+ would be a good start.
If you want to test the waters first, I wrote an introductory to SOC Analyst prerequisite skills that serve as fundamentals for what you need to know as a SOC Analyst, the gateway to cybersecurity.
Hard Technical Skills
Hard technical skills are harder to come by. Its all about projects, projects, projects. They don’t all have to be boring, in fact I wrote a Medium article that is all about fun projects, here:
This Medium article is extremely popular in all circles, including LinkedIn. Its received more recognition than almost all of my other work. Its three projects to give you some exposure to cybersecurity projects that you can do at home on a weekend.
Since everything is moving to the cloud and having cloud exposure is very advantageous, I came up with a fun project for you to do in the cloud in this article:
Another project that I have deployed several times to AWS is the Modern Honey Network. Its much more challenging, but if you can complete it, then you absolutely have the technical skills to be a SOC analyst (and more). Pair this with the SOC Analyst Method here, and practice Security Analysis on your own:
Business Acumen
Cybersecurity is a glorious customer service job. Customer service is a very big part of the job. Knowing how to say bad things in a good way is going to be an important part of your job. Thats where framing comes in.
There are a wide variety of tasks related to cybersecurity. And because all security-related tasks are important, they need to be prioritized appropriately on a case-by-case basis. Determining which elements are important now can be difficult without an understanding of the business as a whole.
In a SOC queue, a big part of someone’s job is prioritizing the work for you but as you become more senior that will become more and more a part of your own job. I like the Eisenhower matrix for prioritizing tasks. Its simple and fast and crazy effective.
Most of us in cybersecurity work from home at some capacity and its a very important part in your career to learn how to communicate with people remotely. That is, learning how to not isolate yourself while you are at work when you are working from home. I wrote an article about business tips for working from home, give it a watch/read.
Culture Fit
Here at Cyber NOW Education we love the SOC. We love everything about it, including this unique but strangely not unique, culture that comes along with it.
After you spend some time in the SOC you will realize just how rewarding it is to be on front lines.
So much action, and we want you to love it like we do. I don’t mean to self promote, but our course SOC Analyst NOW! is a great introduction to the culture of cybersecurity. This is the general SOC culture, but each company is different. I’ve worked at companies that I was just not a good culture fit for and it was miserable for me. I just didn’t fit in and it made me feel unwanted and alone. Whether you lean hard left or right, or right down the middle, there are companies for you. I’ve worked on both sides of the spectrum and I’ve found hard left companies tend to rely on psychology a lot in management style and and hard right companies are more direct to your face, but make no mistake, they both are capitalistic at their very core. Its so important to find a boss that you like and its often not until you’re there do you really find out if you’re a good culture fit or not.
It takes practice to be a general culture fit but after awhile you’ll catch things like this:
And you’ll have a nice little chuckle that FedEX has an arrow in their logo for all the packages they deliver.
Tyler Wall is the founder of Cyber NOW Education by night and works full time in the cybersecurity industry as his day job. He creates cybersecurity training material in his free time, often after feeling the need to shout what he’s just learned and also because a little bit of passive income never hurt anyone.
He holds bills for a Master of Science from Purdue University, and also CISSP, CCSK, CFSR, CEH, Sec+, Net+, A+ certifications
You can connect with him on LinkedIn.
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For a limited of time get a free copy of Jump-start Your SOC Analyst Career eBook that was published June 1, 2024, in exchange for a review on Amazon. Email tyler@cybernoweducation.com
