Cybersecurity Is Beautiful and Magical!

Don’t you get tired of searching for a cybersecurity-related image, and end up with endless images of “hackers with hoodies” and blurred lines of JavaScript code? And, sometimes, don’t you just find cybersecurity presentations to be a little boring … “Beware of clicking on the spear phishing email!”, “The only way is to enable multifactor authentication!” (the stock answer if you ever appear on BBC News and get asked about a recent hack) or “Watch out for ransomware infecting your network … it is not nice!”?

Well, I think cybersecurity is beautiful and magical! Basically, it protects us from people who want to drain our bank accounts of all our money, and from those government agencies who don’t trust anyone. It is full of cool people who focus their research on protecting us from bad people, and who do great advances in moving our untrusted digital world to one which can be trusted, which is more secure and resilient. I see

Those beautiful and magical numbers

And, at the core of our online world we have special numbers — and who are truly magical and beautiful. Without these, we would be stuck in a world of where every network connection could be spied upon. These magic numbers are prime numbers and have managed to avoid our attempts to find a pattern for them.