GUIDE: How to start your Cyber security journey ?

A Penetration Tester, sometimes known as an IT Pen Tester or Ethical Hacker, is normally responsible for probing for and exploiting any IT security vulnerabilities in a clients IT networks, systems and websites.
The fun bit of this job revolves around the ‘ethical hacking’ of the target systems but you also need to produce a professional report for the client.

This job may involve developing automated penetration scripts, and using off the shelf tools, to penetrate web based applications, IT networks and computer systems.
The role encompasses the simulation of real world cyber attacks, reporting on results in order that the organisations can use the outputs from the penetration testing in order to improve its IT Security.
The Penetration Tester will need to produce a comprehensive report showing where these identified weaknesses are with suggestions around how to mitigate against them in future.

Responsibilities may include:

1. Planning and performing relevant penetration tests on computer systems, networks or web-based applications.
2. Designing and implementing new penetration testing tools and techniques that can be deployed during Penetration testing on behalf of the client.
3. Conducting a physical security assessment of an organisations systems, including servers and networks, ensuring that any unauthorized external physical interference is not possible.
4. Pinpointing the methods that attackers would use to gain access to the clients systems and underlying data, identifying exploits and weaknesses within the organisations IT Security defences.
5. Uncovering inadequate security practices, password policies and other human errors using social engineering techniques. Recommending processes and procedures to mitigate against human error in future.
6. Ensuring that file, directory and login permissions are restricted to those that need access to them and no one else.
7. Collate all findings together into a formal document with the report highlighting all issues uncovered together with recommended remedial actions that should be taken by the client.
8. Present the penetration testing findings to all interested parties such as senior IT management, directors and their impacted teams. Explaining the details of the individual findings, where required, and your experience and recommended next steps.
9. Highlight the project scope and requirements necessary for the organisation to patch, fix and isolate any of these newly discovered IT security flaws. Training, or indeed re-training, of the impacted systems users, may also be necessary. This work should take place alongside the creation of new documentation supporting both new and existing systems going forwards.
10.  Recommending a process of penetration and vulnerability testing that the organisation could carry out themselves in future. Penetration and vulnerability testing of the live or production environment on a regular basis is necessary in order to maintain a secure environment as new threats and exploits emerge.
11.  The Penetration Tester should be able to verify the client’s remedial actions, providing feedback and verifying their fixes to any highlighted security issues. Often a final Penetration Test will be necessary to confirm success!

Learn about underlying technology and business models. You want to understand how businesses operate so you can protect them and ensure new regulations don’t hinder company innovation. Grab some good business books and gain business exposure by learning from executives and managers with real-world experience. Study industry best practices , like those from the Center for Internet Security , as well as regulated standards like HIPAA , PCI-DSS , DISA STIG , ISO 27001 , SOC2 to understand how to make your organization compliant without negatively impacting productivity.

Security Consultant – This position will help you gain experience working in IT or IT security , so you can understand the business and broaden your horizons. If you decide that you want to stay in consulting, research what big companies are doing, technology they use, and regulations they’re subject to, then learn how to manage these for them.

SOC Analyst is responsible for monitoring, reporting, and analyzing security incidents reported by our SOC team.

The primary role pertaining to this position is to manage and provide weekly reports for the security incidents, manage the potential security incidents backlogs, analyze and investigate the incidents, monitor the analytics tools and perform alert management and initial incident qualification. He or She  will work in a transversal manner  with SOC , IT security  and IT infra teams.

Missions expectations

• Experience with an enterprise-grade SIEM platform (i.e Splunk).
• Experience in Security Event analysis & triage, incident handling and root-cause identification, and security tickets management.
• Specialty in one or more of the following Information Security domains: Cyber Intelligence Analysis, Threat Monitoring, Incident Response, Machine Learning & Artificial Intelligence, Malware Analysis, Computer Forensics, Endpoint Protection, Network Security, Infrastructure Security, Application Security, Platform Security, Identity & Access, Management, Security Education & Awareness, Vulnerability Scanning & Management, and Compliance & Risk Management
• Excellent team-working skills, and a “can do, let’s get it done” attitude is crucial.
• A desire to keep learning, extending your skills and pushing the boundaries of your knowledge.

Responsibilities

• Prioritizing and differentiating between potential intrusion attempt and false alarms.
• Examples of incidents involve unauthorized access, suspicious services, malware identification, etc.
• Work within, and ultimately help shape, our response framework for globally scalable cyber defense
• Provide technical guidance to client organizations to correctly gather relevant data, analyze and respond to cyber security incidents.
• Contributes to the development and improvement of SIEM control policies.
• Apply broad security industry, technology, business and professional knowledge to contribute to policy-making and process design.
• Correlate threat intelligence with active attacks and vulnerabilities within the enterprise.
• Research and stay current on the latest trends, best practices, and technology developments.
• Facilitate the integration of threat and data feeds for the purposes of incident response.

Develop and document a standards compliant security framework that can be applied to secure architecture reference models across multiple software products/development teams in distinct geopolitical regions.

Continuously improve, document, and support development teams on the secure deployment tool chain in SaaS and associated processes, moving towards more automation and shorter turn-around times.

Work across multiple development teams to implement and train deployment engineers on how to effectively architect both cloud and on-prem software solutions

• 5+ years of security work experience in an engineering or software development discipline
• Focus on computer science, computer engineering, information sciences, information technology, or engineering field with specialization in cyber security.
• Experience with virtualization and configuration of IaaS, PaaS and SaaS environments and associated software development environments using Microsoft Azure and/or AWS
• Network Security – can create a local lab network consisting of various components. Deploy services like LAMP (Linux, Apache , MySQL, PHP) stack and research how to secure each element.

  While building, can analyze what issues can arise during configuration and maintenance so you know what to avoid and how to test them when sysadmins hadn’t the time, interest or knowledge to do so.
  Then, focus on PTES (Penetration Testing Execution Standard) Technical Guidelines to discover ways in which penetration testers and hackers can attack your network. Reverse engineer their methods to build proper defenses against future attacks.

This narrow specialization requires focus in at least one field. Become proficient in at least one programming language, framework , and operating system. Then focus on a narrow set of functions in a given product or service. Examples include studying assembly , C programming language, learning how video transcoding works, and identifying weak spots in a library such as FFmpeg.

Software engineers often become security experts. Be proficient in at least one technology stack, then apply all relevant security knowledge to making products safer. Strengthen security across your organization, responding to the demands of your colleagues and customers.

Web App Security Tester – Learn how to code. It’s not necessary, but it is beneficial and it’s usually what separates wannabe experts from true experts. Learn how software stacks work and get a handle on web programming languages like Java, php and their respective frameworks. To break something and improve its resiliency afterward, you should understand how it all works. Once you review all the OWASP resources, you’ll know what to do next

Cryptographer/Cryptoanalyst – If you want to become an expert in this field, I recommend attending a university with strong mathematical and cryptography programs. This is a fascinating field that requires prior and substantial mathematical knowledge.

Chief information security officer (CISO) is the senior-level executive within an organization responsible for establishing and maintaining the enterprise vision, strategy, and program to ensure information assets and technologies are adequately protected There are also many other jobs (around 50 specialities) like SOC analyst, Digital Forensics, Threat Hunter etc…

There are many jobs within cybersecurity that require specific technical expertise or qualifications.

However, there are as many cybersecurity ‘adjacent’ roles or generalist roles where some knowledge of cybersecurity is needed to perform the role, but cybersecurity technical skills are not required. If, for example, a company requires someone to run cybersecurity training and awareness within your organization, this typically does not need a cybersecurity qualification, but rather the emphasis should be on competencies needed to develop and manage effective and efficient training.

Technical skills are not always the most important needed by hirers. That’s why we have analyzed hundred of job offers to assist you to learn ONLY what you need to get the job that MATCHES your profile.