How to learn cybersecurity at home

Connecting the dots.

How to learn cybersecurity at home

You may be looking for a new career and stumbled upon cybersecurity and are all excited about it now! That makes me happy to think about. Its my job now to explain to you how to start learning cybersecurity at home.

There are a few things that make a well-rounded entry-level cybersecurity professional. But first, let me explain the Security Operations Center Analyst. The SOC Analyst is the gateway to cybersecurity because it is the most junior position often available in a company for cybersecurity, and the high turnover rate (usually because of promotions out of the SOC) means the position opens up frequently. SOC Analysts typically come from one of these four areas:

The four backgrounds of SOC analysts

When we say career changers, we typically mean people from other areas of IT. I am an expert in training for entry-level cybersecurity, and I promise you that 90% of the time, folks find it easiest to land an SOC analyst job and then pivot to the specialties they are most interested in.

Now that you know you need to target an SOC analyst, let's discuss the four areas that make a well-rounded SOC analyst.

• High Level Concepts

• Hard Technical Skills

• Business Acumen

• Culture Fit

Culture fit is essential, and that's also a specialty of mine. Not that I’m perfect for every company, because I’m most certainly not, but typically, since I have spent the last 10 years in an SOC, I can speak the language. While not 100% effective, there are ways to maximize your culture fit as an SOC Analyst, but if you want just to be you, there's the right place for you, too. Just know who you are and what you stand for.

High-Level Concepts

The high-level concepts everyone should know, not just for cybersecurity experts, but anyone in a professional capacity. What is the separation of duties, least privilege, and the CIA triad? These are fundamentals in cybersecurity, and the best place to learn is CompTIA’s Security+ Certification. Long-standing and well-regarded as the minimum standard for entry-level cybersecurity.

For high-level concepts, it should be very structured and maybe even boring, as it's the same information we all get and know (and repeat). Any one of Udemy’s courses for Security+ would be a good start.

If you want to test the waters first, I wrote an introduction to SOC Analyst prerequisite skills that serve as fundamentals for what you need to know as a SOC Analyst, the gateway to cybersecurity.

Hard Technical Skills

Hard technical skills are harder to come by. It's all about projects, projects, projects. They don’t all have to be boring; in fact, I wrote an article about fun projects here.

This article is extremely popular in all circles, including LinkedIn. It has received more recognition than almost all of my other work. It consists of three projects that give you some exposure to cybersecurity projects that you can do at home on a weekend.

Since everything is moving to the cloud and having cloud exposure is very advantageous, I created a fun project for you to do in the cloud in this article.

Visit our Knowledge Base for a complete list of free projects and visit our courses for premium projects.

Business Acumen

Cybersecurity is a glorious customer service job. Customer service is a huge part of the job. Knowing how to say bad things in a good way will be an essential part of your job. Learning soft skills is a crucial part of business acumen, starting with a healthy dose of understanding. If you feel upset or frustrated with someone you're working with, consider asking them the central question, "How did you arrive at your conclusion?" - it's a fast way to understand each other better.

There are a wide variety of cybersecurity tasks. Because all security-related tasks are important, they need to be prioritized appropriately on a case-by-case basis. Determining which elements are important now can be difficult without understanding the business as a whole.

In an SOC queue, a big part of someone’s job is prioritizing the work for you, but as you become more senior, that will become more and more a part of your own job. I like the Eisenhower matrix for prioritizing tasks. It's simple, fast, and crazy effective.

The Eisenhower matrix

Most of us in cybersecurity work from home at some capacity, and it's an essential part of your career to learn how to communicate with people remotely. That is, knowing how not to isolate yourself while you are at work when you are working from home. Give this video a watch.

Culture Fit

Here at Cyber NOW Education, we love the SOC. We love everything about it, including this unique but strangely not unique culture that comes along with it.

After you spend some time in the SOC you will realize just how rewarding it is to be on front lines.

There is so much action, and we want you to love it like we do. I don’t mean to self-promote, but our course, SOC Analyst NOW!, is an excellent introduction to the culture of cybersecurity. This is the general SOC culture, but each company is different. I’ve worked at companies where I was not a good cultural fit, which was miserable for me. I just didn’t fit in, and it made me feel unwanted and alone.

Whether you lean hard left, right, or right down the middle, there are companies for you. I’ve worked on both sides of the spectrum, and I’ve found hard left companies tend to rely on psychology a lot in management style, and hard right companies are more direct to your face, but make no mistake, they both are capitalistic at their very core. It's so important to find a boss you like, and it's often not until you’re there that you really find out if you’re a good culture fit.

It takes practice to be a general culture fit but after awhile you’ll catch things like this:

FedEx Truck

You’ll also have a nice little chuckle when you see that FedEx's logo has an arrow for all the packages it delivers.