How to get started in Cybersecurity in 2022

This is a roadmap for beginners who are interested in learning about cybersecurity and don't have proper knowledge of the field and have no one to guide them.

Hey guys, hope you all are doing great in your life. Before starting, let me clear one important point, this writeup is not on “how to become a cybersecurity expert” or “how to become a most paid ethical hacker” or something like that.

The article is for beginners and intermediate learners who either want to make their career in cybersecurity or are interested in exploring this field as a passion. So, now let's start the write-up by firstly learning about this field. Everything written in this write-up is completely my personal opinion and other cybersecurity experts and learners may have a different opinion.

What is Cybersecurity?

Cybersecurity is the protection of internet-connected systems such as hardware, software, and data from cyber threats. The practice is used by individuals and enterprises to protect against unauthorized access to data centers and other computerized systems.
In simple words, cybersecurity is the practice to protect computers and other electronic devices, networks, and a company or organization's infrastructure from hackers and other people having the wrong intentions.
We mainly protect the devices from cyberattacks and improve their security so that they cant again use the same methodology to do a cyber attack again.
The main aim of cybersecurity is to reduce the risk of cyber-attacks and protect against the unauthorized exploitation of systems, networks, and technologies.

Why do we need Cybersecurity?

Now, I suppose that most of you are already aware of the facts that why we need cybersecurity, but if still, there is someone who doesn't have a clear understanding or has no idea about it, don't worry I will explain this in brief.

I think you all have once heard of any news about any big cyber attack on any reputed company or organization. ok, let us understand why we need cybersecurity by an example. Let's assume a situation and with the help of that, I will be explaining why we need cybersecurity.
There is a person named Bob who works in an international bank. one day while bob was coming to the office, he found a Sandisk pen drive of 256GB, he thought that he should check the data of the pen drive and would return it to its actual owner if he found any information about him inside the Pendrive. Now what happens is bob reaches his office and plugs the pen drive into a computer system on his desk. After a week of this incident, it is revealed that many of the employee's details, in short, a database having customers' and employees' information including their bank account details, their credit, and debit card details got leaked. Now can anyone of you guess what is supposed to happen there?

There is a high probability that it was a pre-planned cyberattack on that organization, bob found that Pendrive, that was not an accident, that's a social engineering attack and bob was the victim who got into the trap. As per the case studies of many cyberattacks in the past, we can easily guess that the Pendrive that was plugged by bob into the company's system contains which was either controlled by hackers remotely or it was also pre-configured for that cyberattack.

Now, many of you may be thinking what is the role of cybersecurity here?

In the above situation, the attack should be successful if Bob has a basic understanding of Social engineering attacks and cyberattacks which directly proves that the company in which Bob was working had not taken any safety measures and most probably don't have a good team for incident response handling. The above attack should have failed if their employees have taken any cyber awareness training and they have installed malware and antivirus programs in their system and had taken other safety measures.

The trend of Jobs in CyberSecurity

cybersecurity is a vast field, ranging from a normal helpdesk job to working as a security researcher in a multi-national company like amazon, or Facebook. if we seriously talk about careers, there are lots of jobs in cybersecurity. and as per the research from many reputed institutes, it is calculated that there would be a shortage of more than 3million cybersecurity jobs around the globe.
so, you can think maybe currently we don't have many opportunities in cyber but in the future, there would be a lot of opportunities in cyber. I will write one more in-depth article on this in the future, so let's move on to the next topic.

From where to start learning Cybersecurity?

There is no exact and perfect answer to this question as everyone is unique, everyone has a different mindset, a different level of thinking, and a different level of knowledge. Let’s now get a brief idea on this topic and will do an in-depth analysis on this topic in upcoming blogs.

In my opinion, before starting learning about different topics in cybersecurity, you should first explore the field. Once you have a basic understanding of this field, choose your target or your dream job or choose what exactly you want to do in this field?

For exploring this field, I always suggested the “Introduction to Cybersecurity” course by Cisco Networking Academy.

The reason for suggesting this course as this will give you a good understanding of cyberattacks and the need for cybersecurity by learning creatively. I liked this course too much even though I was having a good knowledge of cybersecurity at that time, also it is a beginner-friendly course and free too, and it's a masterpiece.

Once you complete the above course, read some good articles or writeups on topics like google dorks, osint, etc.

Checkout next part of this blog at , How to get started in Cybersecurity in 2022 (Part-2)

You can follow me for learning my writeups on topics related to ethical hacking and cybersecurity and a few topics on technology and to knowing my tips and tricks which I use to save my time and for better results.

This is it for today, we will continue this write-up in my upcoming blogs, follow me for more amazing and interesting content like this.