Next Up, Cybersecurity

A talk that teaches people "How to Survive & Thrive in the World of Cybersecurity".

My friends and I who went for this cybersecurity talk.

I attended this talk named "How to Survive & Thrive in the World of Cybersecurity", which is conducted on 23rd May 2019 in Lifelong Learning Institute. This talk introduces what is data security, cloud security and the common cyber security threats faced by individuals and SMEs. It also advertised solutions brought by other companies such as Horangi, a cyber security company.

Why this talk?

As an IT professional or a professional developer, if we don't have the basic knowledge of cyber security, how are we supposed to protect what we have or what we build?

Firstly, I am interested in cyber security. I am inspired by dramas and movies that showed hacking. As I enter this an IT school, I began to understand that what hacking really is, unlike the fictitious stories in dramas and movies. Therefore, I would like to know more about hacking. Moreover, I also want to be able to protect what I build from malicious intends. In the future, I would be coding and making applications or software, which I will not want anyone to hack them or do something that is not authorized to them. Therefore, I think it is essential to learn cyber security skills to be able to protect my own assets or my organization’s assets.

Secondly, as an IT student, I felt that we should be more all-rounded. Not only we must be good at programming, we must also learn to develop software with security in mind. Thus, this talk was a great opportunity to know what are the security problems face by outside companies and learn about the risks and counter measures to those cyber security threats. This is to better prepare myself for the industry.

One major takeaway from this talk

Hackers don't hack your firewalls. They hack your employees instead......

In this talk, they did not mention anything about hacking techniques whatsoever. However, they mentioned about the different types of phishing techniques, and how to counter them. The examples of different types of phishing attacks includes phishing, smishing, vishing and spear phishing. I was amazed by the huge amount of people who fell for phishing attacks. I am aware of such attacks, but I never knew it was this serious until I attended this talk. Therefore, I learnt the various ways of countering phishing attacks, and the gist of the solution is to double confirm plus double confirm. Think before you act. Verify if the information presented to you such as emails and websites are legit before acting upon them. Call the sender to see if they actually sent the email. Check the URL of the website before logging in. These are the things that I have learnt from this talk, and they are quite useful.

Downside

Advertisements, Advertisements, Advertisements......

The downside of this talk is that it spent a lot of time advertising their products instead of covering concepts and theory, which is not very applicable to students like me. Maybe it will be applicable to Small-Medium Enterprises(SMEs) who wants to purchase cyber security products from them. Therefore, I felt that this talk is not very suitable for people who wants to learn, rather this talk is about introducing the threats that are currently out there, and how their products are able to counter them.

Conclusion

I sure learnt a few things in this talk, but it will be fantastic if there are more content for me to learn instead of getting advertised about their products. I think I should be more selective in choosing talks to attend in the future. Regardless, I learn quite a lot from this talk and enjoyed it very much, not to mention that there is free food!