Cyber Learning - Who to Follow Part 1
Some cyber experts and companies who can help you to always be learning
“Always be learning” is a great goal, or better still a great habit to develop and embrace. This is as true in cybersecurity as it is in any profession and in the rest of life, away from our jobs. In cybersecurity it may be particularly useful, given the continuous changing in real-time nature of the cybersecurity space.
A great way to increase our knowledge about any or all of the areas of cybersecurity - at any point in our careers - is to learn from others in the industry. From people. Fortunately, there are many smart people, experts in their field within cyber, who share their thoughts and insights generously and often. There are also many cybersecurity organizations that share excellent learning resources to the community.
There are so many of them that I won’t try to cover this/them in just one post here - so this is Part 1, to be continued at some point in coming weeks or months.
So here is the starter list of good people and organizations to follow and learn from within cybersecurity - with a good bit of variety in terms of where they live within the cyber field:
Black Hills Information Security: BHIS is a top tier InfoSec company in the US, with a team full of talented cyber experts particularly focused on penetration testing and red team exercises. They share educational posts, webinars, and training courses - which are often free or “pay what you can”.
Chris Sanders: “Founder of Applied Network Defense and Rural Technology Fund. Author of Intrusion Detection Honeypots, Practical Packet Analysis, & Applied NSM”. My favorite ever cyber training course - Practical Threat Hunting - is from Applied Network Defense, and Chris’s founding and the work he puts into Rural Technology Fund show what an outstanding human being he is as well.
Katie Nickels: Director of Intelligence Operations at Red Canary and SANS Certified Instructor. One of the leading experts in the field of Cyber Threat Intelligence and possessor of the maybe the coolest Twitter handle ever: @likethecoins
InfoSecSherpa: “#Librarian turned #InfoSec #ThreatIntel analyst. #Ginfosec originator. #Philly jawns. Evertonian #COYB. Your guide up a mountain of information!” What’s not to love here - librarian, InfoSec Sherpa, and rabid sports fan with possibly questionable choices in favorite teams she supports :)
Kelly Shortridge: Senior Principal at Fastly, Keynote Speaker, Product Leader. Author of “Security Chaos Engineering". I especially enjoy seeing Kelly’s posts and watching her speak at conferences because she is consistently at least a little contrarian, sharing counterintuitive but brilliant thoughts with a big dose of humor and wit.
Cybrary: Cybrary offers free and inexpensive cybersecurity courses that cover a wide range of cyber areas and specializations.
CompTIA: CompTIA have been a well known and well respected provider of cybersecurity training and certification courses for many years. There Security+ certification is one of the best entry level cyber certifications to pursue.
That’s it for Part 1 of Cyber Learning - Who to Follow. I want to say thanks to the group who came to the Cyber Starters Live Q&A Meeting last weekend - that’s where the suggestion for this topic came from.