Speaker: Nick Benitz, Senior Partner Support Consultant, ConnectSecure
What’s one of the most interesting changes you’ve observed in the cybersecurity industry recently?
Nick Benitz: So one of the most interesting things and changes that I've seen in the cybersecurity industry recently is how AI is getting involved on both the offensive and defensive side of cybersecurity. So you have things with vulnerability management, more so what I'm focused on dealing with ways that we're using AI to prioritize and triage different risks and determine how we're going to help defend and mitigate some of those risks. Well, you also have attackers using AI to their advantage to assist with exploiting some of those vulnerabilities. So the involvement of AI is something that has been very rapid and developing very quickly, and I'd say that's definitely one of the more interesting changes that we've seen in the industry in the recent years.
What do you expect our industry to look like in the next 5 years?
Nick Benitz: Within the next 5 years, I foresee the cybersecurity industry becoming much more proactive and involved in every single layer of business around the world. Just as you get more and more involved with companies dealing with things in the cloud rather than on site, you're just going to deal with a lot more risks going on. So I think the industry is going to shift. To a much more proactive fix things first ahead of time and mitigate risk ahead rather than chasing down the attackers once it's done. I think that's going to be a very good thing as more and more people become aware and trained in cybersecurity knowledge and different things like that. It's going to help the industry become a lot more secure in that field in general.
What advice would you give to someone getting started in our industry?
Nick Benitz: My biggest piece of advice as someone who has only been in this field for about a year and a half and came straight out of college directly into the field is learn and spend as much time practicing on your own. If you have an infinite amount of resources that are free or very cheap through YouTube or different things like that, um, go on places like Facebook Marketplace or some other sort of used area, eBay, things like that, and get some used networking equipment and set up your own network at home, learn different things like that. Different ports, learn about scanning your home, do some NAP scans of your home, different things like that. Just set up with your own projects, make it fun for yourself, because if you're able to get into it, enjoy it as a hobby, do it on your own time. It will look fantastic to different companies you're applying to that you're proactive enough to learn those things on your own, and it will really hone your abilities in the cybersecurity field to be able to work in these different spaces and industries and be able to have a step up on other people when you're going into these fields.
