The CyberCEO Panel

I feel very fortunate to have been able to attend this panel with the CyberCEO club, and their panel with 3 cybersecurity specialists and their revolutionary work to improve the digital safety of the world.

The Panel

The section was split into three sections covering

  1. CyberSecurity Landscape
  2. Career Opportunities
  3. Future Of Cybersecurity

I really valued the insight the panelists provided and some key ideas I took away from the first part of the panel were ideas of ethical hackers and zero day exploits

CyberSecurity Landscape

The concept of a hacker is almost universally seen as a dangerous figure who aims to commit malice stealing information or worse through technical vulnerabilites. This is a blackhat hacker that companies must engage in cybersecurity to make consistent. However, what if people hacked for good? This concept is known as a white hacker. Companies hire white hat hackers to try to hack into their systems so the developers can patch out exploits before the black hat hackers can discover them. I also learned of Zero Day exploits, which are essentially exploits that the hackers get before the developers could have ever stopped them.

Career Opportunities

For a profession where the idea of isolation and hacking alone comes to mind, cybersecurity does require soft skills aside from the code work. I learned of how being likable and having soft skills are key to being promoted, as people do not like working with people who cannot communicat. For example, if it was necessary to convince a company to invest in their cybersecurity, it’s important to have a good explanation of how it saves the company money, as the company’s first instinct is “how does this make me money”. It’s crucial to have a computer science background to build into cybersecurity, and this is a great as a possible career opportunity for computer science.

Future of Cybersecurity

Cybersecurity is beyond just protecting big companies with lots of user data, it saves people too. Someone’s pacemaker had a vulnerability to be hacked over bluetooth, if it were not for the focus on cybersecurity, that person’s life could have been ended in the click of a button. It’s important to prepare for evolving threats, and staying informed and active all times just like in computer science is the kye to the way forward.