How I Got Into Cyber security - An accident turn into a career!

One of the questions I get asked pretty often is: “How did you get into this line of work?”

Well, if I’m being completely honest… it all happened by accident. You see I’ve always had an interest in computers and loved figuring out how things worked, but cyber security was never really on my radar. Originally, I wanted to become a digital artist and design immersive, realistic levels for video games. For me this was my dream job.

After I finished college, I poured everything I had into landing a job in game development. I built a portfolio, applied to every studio I could find, and every tried my hand a places like Cartoon Network. But I quickly learned that breaking into the gaming industry wasn’t exactly easy — especially when you’re just starting out. So, I shifted gears and picked up a job to hold me over. This job allowed me to repair laptops and desktops, removing viruses, and even do a bit of data recovery.

That job ended up being a turning point for me.

You see one of my coworkers started automating small tasks using batch scripts. Whenever I noticed this I was instantly intrigued, it was like watching magic happen. Before long, the two of us were teaming up to automate everything we could at work. It became a fun challenge for the two of us. We wanted to see how much of our daily grind we would be able to streamline with code?

Then, one day, I walked into the back room in order to swap out a hard drive and noticed that same coworker running a different operating system on his MacBook. Naturally, I asked about it. It was here that I got my first introduction to Kali Linux — This would be the next stepping stone placed in on my career path.

He told me all about it, and just like that, my curiosity was piqued again. That night, I dove into the documentation, tutorials, and forums. One thing led to another, and before I knew it, I was completely immersed in the world of cyber security.

I started consuming every bit of content I could, learning about the differences between ethical hacking and hacking, penetration testing. scope of work, various tools, techniques, and all the things Kali would allow me to do. What started as a random conversation at work eventually grew into a full-blown passion.