What is it?
Protection of computer systems and networks from the theft of or damage to their hardware, software, or electronic data, as well as from the disruption or misdirection of the services they provide.
Why should I learn it?
With cyber threats and attacks increasing in both frequency and sophistication, the demand for cybersecurity professionals is far outpacing the supply. This means that for qualified cybersecurity specialists, job security is practically guaranteed.
How is it applied?
- Prevent
An organization performs activities to make it more difficult for an attacker to compromise its systems, including vulnerability testing and server hardening, network segmentation, password hygiene, and user access provisioning controls.
- Detect
Discover security incidents in progress and alert them to cybersecurity support personnel. Detective controls may involve reviews of firewall and server logs, intrusion detection system (IDS) logs, and changes to system configurations.
- Respond
Response and recovery controls are critical as they are performed once a breach or other incident has occurred.
Creation of an incident response plan: a communication plan to notify authorities, management and affected stakeholders (including end-users, trading partners, and insurance carriers), an approach to restore affected services, the performance of a root cause analysis of the compromise, and the implementation of controls or system changes to prevent a recurrence.
Important Skills:
Intrusion detection.
Malware analysis and reversing.
Programming know-how.
Risk analysis and mitigation.
Cloud security.
Security analysis.
Types of Jobs:
Cybersecurity Analyst
Cybersecurity Engineer
IT Security Specialist
Security Administrator
Security Consultant
Avg Salary:
$90K is the average salary for an entry-level Cybersecurity Analyst
$92.5K is the median salary for a Cybersecurity Engineer
$107K is the median salary for an IT Security Specialist
$94.7K is the average annual salary for cybersecurity jobs across the U.S.
Higher-level jobs avg around 250K