Mastering Cyber Security

The world of cyber security is huge. It's a vast ocean of tools, acronyms, and frameworks, but do you need to know it all?

Let's just focus on the high-level skills, in order, shall we?

(we'll be using roadmap.sh/cyber-security for this)

Basic IT Skills

Cyber Security is an advanced field, it requires a lot of assumed knowledge, one being basic IT skills.

We're talking about the basics of Computer hardware, connection types, basic troubleshooting, and of course, basic networking.

Operating Systems

As a security professional, you cannot control what operating system clients will be using.

You'll need to Be basically familiar with all Linux distributions, from Windows to MacOS.

With Linux being the most popular, I would recommend diving far deeper into that.

Network Knowledge

A deep understanding of networking is a none negotiable in Cyber Security, with the requirement to know IP addressing inside out, packet sniffers, port scanning, and protocol analyzers all require you to know networking inside and out to be able to parse the results.

Security Skills

The main meat of the industry, and a topic that reaches so far that I imagine a very limited amount of people truely understand it all.

Including but not limited to:

• Forensics
• Runbooks
• Kill Chains
• Zero Trust
• Incident Response Tools
• Hacking Distros
• Logging
• Common Attacks
• Attack Types
• System Hardening
• And 100 other areas

It's overwhelming I'm sure but I would advise starting small and focusing on a certain niche instead of attempting to attack the entire industry.

Cloud Skills

While you're not expected to know the ins and outs of cloud engineering, you should however have a good grasp of Cloud Security, cloud models, cloud services, and the main providers.

Programming Skills

While being a seasoned programmer is not a requirement, much like DevOps, being familiar with the basics of Python, Bash and others can make you more productive and even help reverse-engineer or write your own tools in the future.

The Cyber Security roadmap on roadmap.sh is the biggest one on the platform with over 300 nodes, which of course can be very overwhelming, especially to a beginner so my advice would be to start small, and start by learning Linux and Networking basics, without these skills you will struggle when it comes to learning the advanced topics.