How Being Hacked Launched My Career in Cybersecurity

What’s your Infosec origin story?

I’ve always been fascinated by how other Cybersecurity professionals ended up in their roles. For some it was a childhood dream to be a hacker (or catch hackers) after watching an old school hacker movie, others fell into roles organically after a career in enterprise IT, and if we’re being honest, some are in it for the money. With record shortages in skilled security personnel, the field is growing with more and more diverse people with different backgrounds.

I’ve always enjoyed my own origin story (though I may be biased), partially because it was so unexpected. Here it is.

Notice: Any names and specific details have been changed due to privacy concerns.

Deployment Day

This story starts back when I was a QA Analyst. I’d actually just been promoted to a Senior Analyst and one of my new duties was to manage our biweekly production deployments.

At the time our primary application was a monolith and our deployment process relied on a number of different databases which often needed to be migrated as well as a handful of other build steps. All in all the deployment process itself would take roughly 30 minutes and pretty much needed a constant babysitter incase we…