The Most Important Requirements of a Cybersecurity Specialist
Almost not a day passes without the news of a massive ransomware attack, or sensitive data breach, that affects both individuals and businesses across all industries. Cyberattacks are becoming more sophisticated, targeting everything from personal health records to credit card data.
The job of a cybersecurity professional is to protect themselves from such attacks by analyzing weaknesses and taking preventative measures. To do this effectively, they need certain skills that are both technical and non-technical.
To stay up to date with latest hacking techniques, it’s essential for cybersecurity professionals to be familiar with various computer systems and platforms. This includes understanding of programming languages, forensic investigation techniques and specific tools (e.g. the ones used for digital forensics and penetration testing). For example cybersecurity analysts need to understand how IoT devices connect to the Internet and how they could be attacked.
It’s also essential that cybersecurity experts are skilled in identifying, assessing and prioritize risk for their organization. It’s impossible to defend yourself against every threat because hackers can use an endless variety of ways to cause problems. A security professional would know that passwords must be long and complex and contain an assortment of lower- and uppercase letters, symbols, as well as numbers. Also, they should not include personal information like birthdays or family members names.
To be a successful cyber-expert, you must have empathy for both the perpetrators and victims of cyberattacks. This will help them understand what a cyber-hacker might be thinking. They can then create stronger defenses.
