Contemplating Working in Cybersecurity

Laurieanne Byrne
Sep 3, 2018 · 3 min read

Ideal Job

By looking at indeed.com for cyber security related jobs near me, the first job listing shown was to work as a Special Agent for the FBI. For me, that would be a dream come true because since I was a little kid (probably around 10 years old) I’ve always been interested in the idea of hacking into things for the sake of solving crimes.

Unfortunately, my interests tend to change fairly quickly and go all over the place such as wanting to be a veterinarian to an astronaut to a musician. All I did with the idea of wanting to be a Special Agent was play with toy spy kits and pick any key locks in my house and relative’s house that I could get my hands on. Other than those minor little things I would fool around with, I never took the idea seriously; therefore, just like my attention span, I moved onto the next interest I had at the time (wanting to be the first female president of the United States) when I got bored.

Five years later from having that initial ideal job (15 years old), I finally came back to the idea and thinking of a similar career field after getting really into video games. Now, for the past 2 years, I’ve been nourishing that interest of working with computers by continuously take classes offered at the high school as well as taking Japanese and Korean in hopes that I can have this idea flourish and turn into something more than just a “wish”. If only I started learning and teaching myself more about the workings of a computer , hacking, and a foreign language earlier, I could’ve been more skilled at a much earlier age.

I wish I was as smart as this 12-year-old hacker

Interests

  • Passwords and learning how to crack them

In the immediate moment I would like to learn more about how to crack passwords mainly because that’s my science fair idea that I need to get done within the first semester of school; How Easily Can Your Password be Hacked Using Python. But, I’ve always wanted to learn more about how to crack passwords. Granted, I wanted to learn how to do this for unethical purposes in the past, but now as a mature almost adult I’d use that knowledge to hack into things for white hat hacking for future work purposes only. Also by learning about passwords, I could lean the best way to making a more secure password and ways to remember multiple passwords since it is best not to use the same, or similar, passwords across almost all online accounts.


  • Penetration testing companies

I would like to learn how to do penetration testing for companies because I feel that it could kill two birds with one stone (PETA don’t come at me). Pentesting can teach us how to exploit web applications/video games yet still teach us how to be ethical users with our knowledge of hacking into things. Plus if I enjoy pentesting, I could make some money from it if I get good at it eventually.


  • Social engineering and convincing people to do things

Though I don’t like the idea of manipulating people for personal gain, for the sake of hacking and getting into things it looks rather interesting because it shows how too trusting and gullible people can be which can be unfortunate. After getting hooked onto the show ‘Mr. Robot’ there was an episode where Elliot poses as a tech wunderkind to weasel his way into getting a tour of Steel Mountain data center to advance further in his plan to take down Evil Corp. Literally all it took was for an employee to search up Elliot’s alias Sam Sepiole and look only at a fake Wikipedia page for the employee to think he’s legit. Therefore, I would want to learn about social engineering because it seems interesting to test limits with people to gather information without them suspecting much.

Laurieanne Byrne

Written by

Stan legends, Stan BTS

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