Wajih: Stay up-to-date on the latest cybersecurity threats

My name is Wajih and I'm a security engineer at Google working in the digital forensics department. Do you need a background in cybersecurity? No you don't. My past experiences is working at a water park as a snow cone machine guy. I worked at a movie theater selling popcorn in concession stands. During my undergrad, I was a bio major at first like my freshman year. I met someone in a bus who was mentioning about this cool cybersecurity startup that just sounded really cool. Some strategies I leveraged to keep up to date on the latest cybersecurity trends is going on online forums such as Medium to research different security trends and topics. I personally use Medium a lot as I could filter by the tag of like I want to find articles related to cybersecurity and or I want to find articles related to cloud security. Based off their filtering algorithm, I just go on and see like what other people are talking about and then that's what helps me keep up to date. If it's more of like networking that you're looking forward to, then I highly recommend just going out to those like conferences. My advice for people wanting to get into cybersecurity is don't be too overwhelmed with trying to understand every single specialization within cybersecurity. There's so much going on within the cybersecurity field in terms of trends and it's nice to stay up to date with all of those but sometimes you need to take a step back and prioritize what subjects within cybersecurity you are staying most up to date like on. I love this job. I love the challenges. I feel like there is a shortage in cybersecurity professionals out there from just past experiences, hearing from other friends in computer science fields. Most of them say that oh it's too hard, too complicated to get in. Don't listen to those people. I encourage you to push through. It's definitely well worth it. First just get the fundamentals down and be persistent.