I get asked a fair bit “how do I get into cyber security”…. In all fairness, it goes way back… And it’s hard work. Back in the day, I had to figure out how the ZX81 worked just to use it. Over time, the x86 and the 486 and Windows came along. Then came the understanding of a bus, an IRQ. This was all just the computer – let alone networking. Bet you’ve grown up with all the toys, even AI now. Would I have it any other way? No… not really… I got into coding at college. Pascal, ASM and Cobol – I’ll be honest, that was a big leap, but I remember being put in a group in the first week and given the task to make a cup of coffee. Just that. No coding, no computers just a process. Breaking that process down into its smallest parts. I probably got more from that single infuriating exercise than anything else. Where’s the cup? What is a cup? Is it orientated correctly? how many spoons of coffee/sugar, what is a spoon, how big is it – you get the idea – we were there for hours, but we wrote out ‘questions’ – If, Then, Else. You figured out, getting milk from a fridge could be a sub process (function/procedure), so something, check a sub process, check something else. If only Starbucks was around then. Methods and properties for more structured hierarchical languages came later. If we did it now it would be just as annoying, but easier to categorise. cup as an object has a handle so “can i grab the handle?” no, cup.turn(90degrees), loop, yes? get cup.handle.grab… and so on.
Core Knowledge
Cyber or to be any good at it, you NEED to know a lot. Not at first, but you need to have that desire. I was lucky, I was interested in it and I wanted more knowledge. I was a bit crap at school, bit of a geek but only really science and maths interested me but I was average at best. But give me something I love and I will devour knowledge at speed, hacking back then was more of a geeks pastime of curiosity, getting a system or program to do something it wasn’t coded for. It was a like “ha bet you didn’t know it can do that”, that lit my fire but I also knew I didn’t want to be a coder after college. The one thing that it gave me was perspective. I look at a program and “why did they do it that way?”, “how does that work”. It’s all code, all computer programs written by someone (pre-vibe coding), and they were solving a problem in a particular way with code and if you can wrap you head around what they were trying to do, using any program is soooo much easier. It’s just “If Then Else”.
That’s a bit impractical, but not really.
You are reading this page. Do you even know how you are seeing this page? Do you think you are viewing this page “on” the website? If so, you have a bit more to learn about. But to me, nearly everything comes down to encryption and plumbing (networking).
To me what sets Cyber Security experts from IT is knowledge and perspective. What happens in IT? “GET THIS WORKING”, so they click Next, Next, Next Finish (ok a bit mean) but it’s not too far off. So they get it working, close the ticket, onto the next, never think about it. Something breaks “GET THIS WORKING”, do they know they app or how it works, or just able to google the crap out of it to find someone else that had a similar problem but running it with Local Admin rights seems to make it work. What are they going to do? It’s human nature.
Cyber is about the how, the why and should you?
Being around as the knowledge was being discovered was an amazing time, everything, everything was new. Networking to me was dial up internet – and before that Prestel, so my computer using a modem, can call up another computer and ask it for information and it would return information. Yes it was all text back then but it was someone else’s computer that you were talking to and you had no idea where it was. Those coders “got it working”, they didn’t think that someone would try and do anything malicious with it
I could probably write a book or two on this subject but you’re not here for my trip down memory lane, the point I’m making is everything is built on code, and someone had to think that problem through and come up with a solution.
So it’s part computer scientist, it’s inner workings. Why? well how does a computer write a file? How does it read a file? How does that show on your monitor, everything is understandable you just need to slow it all down – a lot! Go back to the coffee analogy. Unwrapping all the key actions, how electricity is manipulated, transported, converted into light and back again, how all those electrical pulses based on a timer, a system clock.
- Ben Eater – 8-Bit computer – this is a MUST – and probably the best way I’ve ever seen it be done. I’d say watch everything hes created. It’s foundations.