My Journey to Cybersecurity CIA Keynote - Heath Adams (aka The Cyber Mentor)

everybody my name is heath adams aka the cyber mentor and i am pleased to be here at cia conference as your keynote speaker this is actually my first keynote talk so bear with me as we go through this but i'm completely honored for this opportunity and i hope that you enjoy the story about to give you so i was asked to come and speak and i was told that i could speak freely about bridging the gap between cyber security and what we think a hacker is and you kind of think of the hacker as the bad guy in the hoodie and there's really a whole field out there of being hackers and i want to take that from my perspective and talk about my journey as to how i became a ethical hacker and how other people can do it too so we're going to go through kind of my life story and kind of talk my journey through and hopefully motivate some of you that might be interested in getting to this field as well so i'm only going to share one powerpoint slide with you today that is going to be my little who am i so who am i well i'm a husband first a hacker second i'm actually a military veteran having served in the army reserves and the medical side i'm a big sports fan a video gamer and i'm also an animal dad i'm actually a former accountant that turned into a security geek and we'll talk a little bit more about my accounting background here in just a few minutes on the day to day i am the ceo of a cyber security company called tcm security we focus on traditional cyber security consulting and ethical hacking i'm also an instructor at tcm security academy and i have personally taught over 175 000 students on the security academy as well as udemy and on youtube i've taught over 140 000 subscribers now if you're interested in contacting me in any way i have a twitch youtube and twitter you can also reach out to me at thecybermentor.com or on my business website of tcm sec dot com so i want to share my life story with you and my background as i think it's incredibly relevant as to how i got to be where i'm at now i learned a lot of life lessons along the way and i didn't take a straight path into cyber security i took a very winded path into cyber security and if you talk to a lot of people in cyber security you'll find that there's very similar backgrounds in that sense that people came from all different walks of life before they found their way into cyber and maybe 10 years ago 15 years ago we weren't even thinking about security as a thing most of us weren't so you can see all these walks of life and their journeys and i'm gonna share mine today with you and hope that you learned something from it so i grew up very very poor i grew up with a as an only child as a only child of a mother who also was an only child i didn't have a father figure in my life and his family was not in our lives my grandparents my grandmother she passed away when i was five my grandfather passed away before i could even remember him and with that being said we didn't have any family it was just my my mom and i growing up and that was really it and because we grew up poor i got to see a lot of different things and experience a lot of different things i went to a school district where i was the minority i was one percent actually most people were of this mixed variety of ethnicities and backgrounds and it was this melting pot and i think that was the first great experience that i had was to be able to see people from all different walks of life and journeys and go to a school where you know this melting pot existed and i got to be friends with all these other people um on the other side of the thing too though when when you're on when you're so poor and we were on government assistance i remember our housing was paid for um food was paid for like we had food stamps i remember clearly vividly that my mom would you know write bad checks just to get by if we needed food or go to the grocery store and we didn't have the money she would write bad check to get it uh and it was it was another side of seeing uh you know the the downside of being poor and it it leads you to having some bad motivators in life which we'll talk about but uh it leads to having this motivator of wanting to to have money and not have to worry about that lifestyle anymore and that lifestyle you know eventually caught up to my mom my mom actually ended up going to jail for for doing that when i was 14 years old 13 years old and this isn't really a story that i've actually shared with many people but my mom went to jail for for doing illegal activities writing bad checks and such and um at the time when she went to jail i was actually placed into a group home so in the united states we have what's called foster homes and we have group homes group homes i in my opinion is the worst of the two because you're actually put into this house with other individuals in my case there was ten other individuals uh or nine other individuals where they had committed some sort of crime in their past or they had been to a juvenile detention center and they were overall just people that were part of the the system so for me personally i was coming from a background where i had never committed a crime i had never done anything and now i was in this household of this group of people where you know they were they had committed crimes and we'd all come from poor diverse backgrounds so we did share some commonalities and it was just it was very tough getting situated growing up and there were a lot of instances where i think i could have fallen off the rails but my my mom i will give her credit was always the one who pushed me to be something that she wasn't so my my mom was a 9th grade dropout so in the united states we go to school through 12th grade she did not finish high school she dropped out in 9th grade i believe my dad also dropped out in 9th grade my grandmother grandparents never finished high school either they were immigrants and so it was it was kind of on me to be the first generation to even graduate high school but i remember my mom always wanting more for me she wanted me to go to college she wanted me to get a degree to make something of myself and you know i'm in this group home at 14. she does her time she gets out she gets me back and i'm living with her again and i'm about 15 years old and i push through i do okay in high school i get into a pretty good college top 50 school in the in the united states and i i go away from school and one day i'm coming home and i'm home for a thanksgiving break my my mom unbeknownst to me was actually into heavy drugs so she was into heroin which i wasn't aware about this is something that was was kind of new to me but she actually overdosed while i was home for thanksgiving and passed away she was in a coma for a little bit passed away about a month later so by the time that i was 19 years old i was out of college still very poor still very fresh to the world i didn't know much of what i was going to do and i was placed into a situation now where i didn't have any family members because my mom passed away i didn't really have a sense of purpose or a sense of where i wanted to be in life and at that point in time uh you know i thought of all different things that i could do to to get out of where i was in that position i was in uh you think of the worst possible things you think of you know maybe maybe i i buy drugs and try to deal them how do you make money how do you get out of this mess if you're if you're a college student and you're trying to make ends meet how do you work and go to school full time with no support while having to pay rent while having to do everything else and for me personally it was a situation where i hadn't really had to pay bills before i didn't really have to do anything my mom took care of all that so it was very much a culture shock to the point where i had to drop out of the school that i was in and move to another college just to come back home and take care of the assets take care of everything that was there so even more starting to lean into that money motivator i started becoming very motivated by by money how do i make money can i uh like i said can i deal drugs can i get jobs what do i do to in order to get into this money in and growing up poor will do that to you it'll motivate you to do things and we see that even even as an off tangent with cyber criminals now and and kova 19 there's an increase in in criminal activity and it's not just because everybody's at home it's because a lot of these people if they're getting laid off in their jobs or they don't have work they're going to turn and look to a lifestyle of crime or something else in order to make money and that's how we develop the uh the bad side of hacking too so money is is a big motivator when you're poor and you look at it in the wrong light sometimes and that's that's what i was doing but i was determined to finish college i was very very determined to finish college i wasn't sure what i wanted to do with my life i thought that i wanted to be a lawyer i thought that that was my passion or something that would be good enough for me on my end that i can make good money and towards the end of studying i actually got into my senior year in college i had taken my law school entrance exams they're called lsats here and i started applying for law schools but i realized that i was doing that not because i was passionate about it and not because i wanted to go to school for three more years but because i was looking at how much money a lawyer could make and would i be happy spending the rest of my life as a lawyer and the answer was no and so i thought about it and i said to myself what could i do in my life right now when i don't know the answer to what i want to do and and for me personally i chose business i didn't know what i wanted to do in business i knew that i was good with numbers and for me i turned to accounting because i knew i would be good at it i thought it was pretty safe everybody needs an accountant they're never going to be shortage of jobs for accounting so i ended up going to school and finishing my degree in accounting and from there i ended up actually getting a mba in computer information systems and finished grad school as well i did spend time in between working in public accounting and quickly i realized that accounting wasn't for me so i uh in between going to grad school and uh doing accounting i or working as an accountant i was working maybe 60 hours 70 hours a week and when you really take it and break it down i was working for a minimum wage i think my starting salary was something around i think was forty thousand dollars a year and that depending where you live could be a lot it couldn't be that much but for an accountant it's really not that great especially when you're working 60 hours 70 hours here i could be working minimum wage somewhere and be making the same amount for for those dollars so it was very disheartening and part of me was just seeking something different and i didn't know what it was that i was seeking or what i wanted to be so i joined the army uh that was my next logical thing i said i've never had a journey before i always wanted to do something honorable i wanted to serve my country i wanted to get out i never been on an airplane before my first flight was actually to basic training when i was in the army so i wanted to do something different i was told by my recruiter when i was going through that you should pick something different than you do in an everyday life because you will get very tired if you're an accountant in the public life and you're an accountant in the military as well and i went for the reserves so that way i could still have a public career and work on my life and that side and still have a service career as well so i ended up choosing the medical field and i had a a great experience in that when i came back i went into my mba program and i graduated that and from there i had decided i think i want to go into i.t but i wasn't really sure so a little bit of background and taught the i.t side of things i got a computer i remember when i was four years old i'm pretty sure my mom cut a bad check for that but don't judge me for it i got a it was a hewlett packard this is before they were even hp i think it was just hewlett packard and it was i think a 1500 megahertz computer and i think it cost quite a bit of money um it was it was quite a bit of money back then i remember we were running on prodigy as a service and then we ran on aol of course and growing up i remember coding on on aol we would make chat bots i remember getting hit with my first attack or somebody hacked me with a virus and they made me download something and i they were opening my cd drive closing my cd drive they could turn your screen blue there were so many different things that that we were doing to each other back in the day and this is my i think my early exposure to hacking and coding and all that stuff and my mom i remember for a time also went to community college and she was bringing home her her homework and her books and one of the classes she was taking was algebra another class she was taking was intro to web design and i remember learning html out of her books and building websites and also i remember doing college level algebra when i was 10. it was just something that was fascinating to me i love the the math the logical side i love the coding and development side and it was just something that got my wheels spinning so fast forward back to graduating my mba program the thought had entered my head that i want to get into i.t i didn't know what i was going to do yet so i started applying to just general i.t jobs like help desk positions i wasn't getting a single call back meanwhile a company here in the states came to me and said we'll pay you 55 000 if you come move to our location and be an accountant for us and i said oh boy 55 000 that's so much money i've never heard of that much money for me personally in my life remember i was making 40 000 before and again i was back to being an accountant but this time it was even worse because in order to take this money and take this decision i had to move to the middle of nowhere and i had the choice to move where i wanted and i remember picking a location that had a walmart here so a big superstore that i could shop at because otherwise everything was so remote and so country that there was just nothing and my drive to work just to put this into perspective i drove 45 minutes each way to work on a two-lane highway so one car going this way one car coming this way and i often had to say hey i'm late today because there was farming equipment in the road driving five miles an hour and you just could not get around it so i was really in the middle of nowhere i left any friends that i had behind i actually had a girlfriend that i left behind anything that was important to me i left and i left it for what for money for a job i didn't even want to be in accounting anymore i left accounting i joined the army i went into my master's program thinking i was going to do something different i was thinking about i.t but the money came back to me and this is part of my roots this is part of being poor i thought to myself i okay you know i i need to do this because it's going to help me financially and i was always thinking what can i be next what new job can i move into once i'm at this job can i become a controller or something move up and how much money can i make that was always the question i would ask it wasn't like what is the job details what does the job do is always how much money can i make so i became very hyper focused on that to the point where i would leave an entire life behind to go live miserably and earn money and over time i learned that it really wasn't the job for me i i would go into work and it was night time when i when i left it was dark out when i left i would get home it was dark out i was working long hours plus driving an hour and a half each day if i was lucky and didn't get stuck behind any farming equipment so with that on top of having a very bad manager and please take this or don't take this lightly i do not bad mouth many people in my life but this manager um was the micromanager of all micromanagers uh just one example that i like to give to put it into perspective is one day i was leaving at 4 59. we get out at 5 o'clock i was done for the day clocked out ready to leave 4 59 she stops me and says where are you going it is not five o'clock yet it didn't matter if the work was done it didn't matter about anything it was one minute to go and you had not completed your shift um somebody breathing down your neck constantly 24 7 and come to learn once i took the job she had one person below her in the position and i was her ninth person below her in three years that means every person before me had quit uh and moved on somewhere else so um when you have a pattern to a problem it becomes evident but apparently they weren't seeing it so i became victim number nine and one day i got to the point where i was honestly fed up it was just another day of of being unhappy just dreading going into work i went into work and i remember that i had gotten so frustrated not that i advocate any of this but i had gotten so frustrated that i took my my company card i took my id i took everything that belonged to the company and i left it on my desk i walked out at lunch time and i never came back i never went back that was my last day as an accountant and i never would ever go back i swore that to myself i went home i went to the management office of where i lived i broke my lease i rented a u-haul and i made the effort of moving out west now this was on a complete whim i didn't have the money for it i didn't really have the cash i had a credit card um thank you for that thankfully for that you know uh but i i had a very very very distant relative that lived in this town called albuquerque new mexico so i drove out there with all my stuff in a u-haul she was somebody that i found on happenstance on facebook and she said hey you can come you know stay with me for a little bit get on your feet and when i got out there it turned out that uh you know she unfortunately was on on drugs too so it was like another situation where i i seemed like i couldn't get away from it and i just told myself i need to get away from this kind of environment this is what i grew up in it's not good it's not healthy and i got out of there as quick as possible and i just thought how am i going to hustle what am i going to do i started applying for jobs and this is really one of the big life lessons that i learned i'm on top of the money thing but we're going to get into the money thing a little bit here uh down the road in the story one of the bigger life lessons i learned is when i was applying for these jobs in it i was looking at help desk i had no credentials okay i had i had my mba it was in information systems i had passion i did not have any knowledge whatsoever i i've been using a computer since i was four years old i was very well versed with with computer platforms troubleshooting etc to an extent but i remember going into the application process and seeing all different types of jobs and their requirements and they had you need three years of experience you need a plus net plus security flaws all these certifications that i just didn't have and there was this one job where they offered fifty thousand dollars which was a little less than i was making on this was on the job description they offered fifty thousand dollars they wanted three years of experience they wanted at least an a-plus and a net plus certification and i became very discouraged i almost clicked close at an application but something told me you need to apply to this job and i did i applied to the job and i actually got called back for an interview and that was the the time that i learned that was my first lesson that the job requirements are there but it's not necessary you can ignore them okay you you need to be the job requirement you don't need to focus on the job requirements you need to make yourself the requirement you need to make the job want you and we'll talk about that too but when you're up against these jobs and you're trying to apply and get into the field whether it be information security or anything you're going to see these outlandish job requirements and just ignore them apply the worst thing that can happen is they say no to you that's the absolute worst thing so you might get rejected that's okay you go and you apply to a different job or a different company if somebody's interest in you if you can make yourself a desirable candidate they will overlook the job requirement or the experience requirement or certain certifications so going into that interview i didn't know what to expect and i got there and they were asking me different types of troubleshooting questions and some i knew some i really didn't know at all and they could tell and they talked to me at the interview they said i can tell that you don't know a lot and i said that's true and that's another thing too during the interview be very honest if you're interviewing for anything be incredibly honest don't try to bs any interviewer they're going to know if you're trying to make stuff up especially they know the right answer so what you need to do is say i don't know but i will find out and just be very honest and when we got into the conversation i said look i am here because i am passionate about i.t i'm passionate about being in this field i don't know everything i don't want to tell you that i know everything because i don't and i will give you a hundred and ten percent effort but i just need you to take a chance at me and with that i also offered them to pay me less i said let me prove to you that i can be your ideal candidate i will take less money to be here and i will work my tail off and i will be the candidate that you want and they brought me back for another interview and i i ended up acing it and i got the job so their job posting was for fifty thousand dollars a year i ended up getting a job i think it was for forty one five forty two um so it was a pretty significant pay cut than what i was at with the 55 000 but nonetheless i was now in i.t i was now at this job where i could be myself and i could learn about everything and boy did i learn about everything because uh i didn't when i got there i thought i knew some stuff i did not know much i had to be taught what active directory was i had to be taught what dns was uh dhcp any sort of networking protocol and it was just study study study all the time so i made it a point that i wanted to get my a plus and i did that netplus security plus ch i did all that um i did all that while i was still at this job and what i would do is if there was it was slow there were no tickets coming in i would be studying and if i would go home i would study because i knew i wanted to grow and develop i knew i didn't want to be in help desk forever though i didn't know what i wanted to be at that time i knew that if i was going to get there i had to do more than what i was just doing now and i have a really good friend who would always tell me he was that he was my co-worker from this job it's actually where we met he would tell me you're no fun all you do is study you you don't want to uh you don't want to play with me we would we used to play like tetris or or do dumb stuff on lunch and it became to the point where i was really motivated to just get these certifications knocked out that i even started putting my friends off a little bit um and he would just tell me these things hey you're you know fun and it's true maybe you're not but if it's something that involves career advancement sometimes you have to be uh you have to be no fun so it got to the point to where one day he and i were actually having a conversation and he said to me do you know that people get paid to hack and i said what do you mean like the bad guys like no there are there's a whole field out there called ethical hackers and you can get paid to hack into people and i just thought that was absolutely crazy because my whole experience has just been watching the movies and seeing the tv shows and people are hacking into things and it's always the bad guy it's always somebody in a hoodie or a dark uniform typing very fast things running across the screen nobody ever explains it to you that there can be good hackers too so a little light bulb went off in my head and immediately i became fascinated immediately i became fascinated and i started going out i started looking and this is a great advice for anybody that's interested in anything google is your absolute best friend google is going to be your best friend throughout your it career but i would go google things and i would say how do you become an ethical hacker and i would look on reddit right it's a very great resource into finding out all kinds of questions if you have a question there's a chance that it's been asked on reddit and somebody's answered it so i looked and tried to just figure out what things i needed to do what did i need to study to get into this field and i kept saying the same things over and over you need to know linux you need to know some sort of coding language so python would be useful you need to have a good networking background chances are that you need some work experience before you get into the field you also need to understand the network side so network methodology pentest methodology you need to understand web app pen test methodology on top of all that it's good to have certifications like the oscp and i just started thinking about okay what do i need to do at that time i think i only had the eight plus and i just told myself what do i need to do to get better how do i how do i get better how do i improve and how do i set this plan forward so i set a goal for myself i said i want to be a pen tester in the next two years and it came down to to learning a few lessons there with the studying part when you move up in the ranks you're going to find that you're going to find a lot of people that are complacent okay when i was studying a plus net plus security plus and i was in my job working help desk there were people that were at that job that had been in the same position for 10 years there's nothing wrong with being in the same position for 10 years but it's a little bit of complacency you can be complacent if you're happy but for me i wasn't happy i wasn't the type of person that wanted to stay in a job for 10 years i had goals i had places i wanted to be so if you have people that try to tell you hey you're not being any fun or this isn't you know i i don't like that you're studying all the time but if it's your if it's your career your decision your motivation and it's what makes you happy that should be your priority that should be your priority with work i'm not saying to completely write out family or friends completely but if you have goals and you set them for yourself that should be a top priority so that is goal number one here is do not be a complacent person especially especially if you're trying to get into information security ethical hacking just as an example there are new attacks new cves new everything released all the time there's also new defenses released all the time it's a cat and mouse game there's always new things if you take a ethical hacking person and you leave them alone for two years they pick up no new knowledge over two years chances are they're going to be left behind this field is just always evolving you need to be studying constantly and that always learning mentality like what i'm describing of wanting to be studying that a plus that netplus so that next thing you have to be passionate about the field you're getting into and you have to be that lifelong learner if you're going to migrate into information security or ethical hacking now back into my story i approached my job and i said i want to do security here we were what is called an msp which is a managed service provider they have mssps which are security managed service provider security service provider which do focus on security and i told them i said i want to get into security i want to build upon that career and they told me you know we we don't really see that happening here and i was kind of torn because this is the company that took a chance on me this was the company that paid for some of my certifications but at the same time i felt like i was outgrowing them and that there was so much more i talked about needing to to have experience potentially or needing to get you know these certifications for for hacking and pick up these extra skills and while i was studying and learning i felt like i'd max my potential i learned all the clients that we had i had learned their software i learned the basic troubleshooting problems i was i was promoted several times when i was there i went from being a level one which is just working a desk to being level two which is doing repairs on site into being a network administrator which was a lot more advanced work compared to doing the help desk stuff and it was great but at the same time i felt like i could move on in do something else so again i started applying for jobs and i applied for jobs in the area i started applying for network engineer positions because i thought that moving into a pentest position i really wasn't ready i needed to focus on something else so i moved into applying for these network engineer positions and again i found myself in the same situation i wanted to apply for these jobs and i just kept coming into well you need a ccna well you need four or five years experience you need all these things and i didn't meet any of the criteria yet again so i took my lesson that i learned from the first time around of not paying attention to the requirements just ignoring the requirements and applied and eventually this organization called sandia national labs which is a research facility it's a department of energy research facility united states reached out to me and said hey we're interested in and talking to you so i applied for a network engineer position i have the interview the interview goes fairly well but the the big issue comes up that i don't have a ccna and most of my experience with working with cisco and they were a cisco shop most of my experience working with cisco was from a gui or a graphical interface that i could kind of point and click insert in commands and it was great they were all command lines so ccna was super important it was very important to be able to understand the configurations that were in front of you and again i was in a situation where i really wasn't the most qualified out of all the people that they interviewed but at the same time i told them i said look here i am i promise you that i am i'm dedicated to this job i want to learn this something i'm passionate about and i promise you i will get my ccna if you bring me on board and that did the trick they actually called me back and they offered me a senior position at the company they were um very thrilled to to have me they thought i interviewed very well and brought me on and within the first month i got my ccna at that job i held my promise as well because i was passionate i wanted to learn i wanted to know more and i was hungry i was motivated so you got to be you've got to be hungry you've got to be motivated especially if you're going to be moving up you cannot be complacent again so always be hungry do not be complacent and ignore the job requirements these are the lessons that we're kind of picking up over time right now moving on i knew the ultimate goal was that this was a stepping stone i didn't want to be a network engineer forever but i was i was there and i didn't want to say i was paying my dues but i was definitely using this job in order to get to another one so i had found out at the job that there was the opportunity to work as a pen tester at that job okay so i met with some of the pen testers they had a whole another division that did pen testing or ethical hacking and they told me look go get your oscp certification and we'll bring you on so i went i asked for the ostp certification from my boss boss said yes i'll pay for it he knew my intentions and he covered the oscp and i studied for the oscp and i passed the oscp which if you don't know what the oscp is it's an ethical hacking certification that is kind of like a golden ticket it's practical so you have to hack into so many machines in order to get your certification and it's respected at least as getting your foot in the door in the industry so i went out and got that and i went to the job and they told me well actually you don't have a computer science degree so we can't hire you it didn't matter that i had the piece of paper that they wanted or the the oscp or the passion or anything else and this is government okay they said because you do not have this piece of paper that says computer science on your background we're just not going to hire you so i was i was distraught and again i was back at the drawing board but i ended up finding a career again i ended up being the outgrowing that and ready to move on and started applying and some of the things that i found when i was going through my job application process into trying to apply for ethical hacking jobs was there was a lot of gatekeeping all around okay there's a there's a lot of gatekeeping the oscp certification is great it will not necessarily get you into an interview uh you know there are not many opportunities either so for me personally i had to be willing to move or go into other jobs and that was a little bit stressful too because i was i had a girlfriend or fiance at the time and who's now my wife but at the time she had grew grew up in new mexico she had never left new mexico so convincing her to move with me was going to be difficult as well if we had to do that so we get to this point where there's there's a lot of gatekeeping and i'm again you saw gatekeeping too with the the whole degree certification uh type deal so um it takes a lot of time and patience patience is absolutely critical and networking is another thing that i think is critical so if you are not networking now you absolutely need to be i was a part of a slack group i was a part of discord channels i was just as a whole out there in making friends with people i was talking to people when i was doing my oscp certification or studying for it that were also studying for it i think that really helped i would talk to people that were already working in the field i would just get general advice and when it came time to looking for jobs and applying for work a lot of the chances and interviews that i had came from those people so being able to network and establish those relationships and connections super super important now eventually i made my way into the field i got um quite a few interviews and the interviews that i had in front of me were um really there was three of them one was a job that was from somebody that i was networking with and it was uh 40 travel which is a lot of travel you're gone pretty much every other week another job was a job where there was a good opportunity it was completely work from home i wouldn't have to move but at the same time there were 55 hours a week that i'd have to be working the job would have no hand holding when i talked to the manager he told me that you need to come in you need to be prepared to work and we're not going to really teach you anything you just need to pick it up as you go personally i wanted somebody to hold my hand and train me i wanted a good work life balance so the 55 hours a week wasn't going to cut it and then i found a job where they said hey you're going to have to move you'll be remote most of the time you work from home but if you have to go on site you have to be near us but at the same time we'll pay for your training you're only going to work 40 hours a week and we're going to teach you we're going to train you we're going to make you into a better pen tester and that for me was was the best choice out of it so i was very patient and that's another key takeaway here is to make sure that you're patient with your job a lot of people i see make the mistake of applying for any job and every job and then taking the first one that comes and it can be exciting to get a job offer absolutely but you want to make sure that the job that you're going for is going to make you happy so make sure that it's going to make you happy i was not going to be happy if i was working 55 hours a week and especially if nobody's gonna be there to hold my hand help me with training etc so make sure that you're happy now when i was in my pen test job i started working on my other passion which is teaching and i'd made it into pen testing i was very excited but i wanted to give back to the community i wanted to uh give back what i was learning and i started with creating a youtube channel and i started with making walkthroughs i started making lesson plans and courses and just doing all the stuff that related to my passion and over time my channel started growing and i think i told you at the beginning we're somewhere i think at 140 000 subscribers i mean it grew pretty significantly to the point where my write-ups my walkthroughs my video content people were starting to recognize my name people were starting to come to my job and it had been a couple years since i had been at my job now but they were coming to my job and they were saying hey heath works here right uh can we get heath to do our pen test because we know who he is and we really like his style we want him to do our pen test and i i wasn't seeing any of this action i wasn't seeing any money no referral bonuses nothing it was just like all these people are coming in so the wheels start spinning for me that maybe it's time that i go into business for myself and leave this the side behind of of working for somebody else and that's that's what i did i went into business myself i started this training academy i started doing courses i started doing client engagement work and migrated into being my own self person but i want to kind of talk about a high level i've kind of walked you through my life story but there's so many little lessons to take away into being this ethical hacker being this journey on this journey into ethical hacking that i think are super important so we start back with the beginning where we talk about uh you need to ignore ignore the requirements okay if you're applying for jobs you want to get into this field ignore the requirements and if you wanted to get into this field too google is going to be your best friend if you want to be a hacker do the research understand what you need to do you can actually ask dumb questions in the the cyber community if you do not do your research and you go into a community and you just ask a question i'll give an example by the way one of the questions was that somebody has taken the time to email me before is what is the password to log into kali linux which it used to be root tor and now it's just cali cali somebody took the time to email me that question and this has happened on at least 10 occasions by the way if not more but they could have gone to google asked that question and figured it out so that tells me that you're not putting in the work or not doing the research and we get these questions all the time so make sure you're doing your research and you're you're using google effectively and you're creating a life lesson plan once you start to understand the plan that you want to take and the path that you want to go down then start applying for jobs that can get you there like help desk is great sock analyst jobs into pen testing great network engineer great but you have to understand the requirements of what you need to do to get here if you want to be a good hacker you have to have a linux foundation you have to have somewhat of a coding foundation you have to have a network foundation and then you build upon that you start to understand the methodology you start to understand the different types of network attacks in web app attacks and wireless attacks and you build upon it i'm not here today to tell you xyz this is what you need to do there there's research that can be done for that but i'm telling you the the huge career advice that i can give you into getting into this field the next best thing here is complacency please if you want to be successful in this field do not do it for uh anybody else but yourself and do not be complacent okay a couple things here you will encounter people that will tell you you're studying too much you're you're doing too much you need to uh you need to take some relaxation and hang out with me or and that's okay it's okay to do that as long as you do that in moderation but do not be the like the people that you see that are in the same position for 10 years and have no desire to move up because if you're in this field you need to always be studying you need to always be thinking the next thing now i told you we're going to talk about money we're bringing back money money is a huge motivator but you have seen now that i haven't talked about it since i was talking about accounting all the way that i got through accounting i was talking money money money money money because that's all that was on my mind when it came to ethical hacking it was just what can i study next what's the next thing i love this field i'm passionate about this field the money's fantastic by the way in the united states my first job was and two thousand dollars a year when i left that job i was making a hundred and forty thousand dollars a year the money is great but it was never something that was i even on my mind like i i was so passionate about hacking i was so passionate about it that it was what i really wanted to do and we see in this field we see a lot of people make the mistake of using money as a motivator or the other motivator is that hacking sounds cool hacking is it just sounds awesome it it it is awesome it's sexy it's great it makes a lot of money but there's a reason why it is this way okay and this is not to discourage you this is to motivate you the the reason why we have this is basic economics we're in the the time frame right now where we have not enough pen testers and a lot of people wanting pentesters and what does that mean that means high salaries why is that happening though because people are thinking i want to get into this field because it sounds cool but they do not realize the amount of work that it takes to get into this field you have to be motivated you have to study all the time it is a lot of work but it is incredibly motivating for me when i sit down and i work on a project and i work on hacking i am i just lose the track of time i'm absolutely in love with it i never think about man this is work every day that i went into work as an accountant i thought when is it five o'clock how can i get out of here can i get out of here any faster it's never like that for me anymore and it shouldn't be like that for you either this should be a motivator i know plenty of people in this field that will work and then they'll study uh they'll work or they'll build a lab they'll work and they'll play hack the box they'll do other stuff that's just fun for them so you have to make sure that this is something that you absolutely want to do before you get into it but it is incredibly rewarding if you do and uh these are these are the minor motivators for you so always study don't be complacent don't do this for money do this for passion if you're interested in getting in this field feel free to to reach out to me again on on twitter you can join my discord community there's plenty of options for you there's a lot of free training there's a lot of cheap training there's a lot of guides out there on how to break in but you have to make sure that this is for you all right so hopefully that makes sense this is this has been my talk uh we have a shortage and i want to see all of you make your way in here and i want you to be passionate and be motivated and want to be ethical hackers so the next time that you think about the bad guy in the hoodie think about how you could be the good guy helping prevent that think about the other side if you didn't know that ethical hacking was a thing until today think about the good side and the things that you can do there think about the motivators that i've talked about in the life lessons and it doesn't just apply by the way it's ethical hacking it applies to everything ignore the job requirements don't be complacent study hard be motivated be passionate don't chase the money the money will find you okay don't chase the money the money will find you find passion in your life use it to motivate yourself do what it is that you want to do and find success thank you so much i really hope you enjoyed this talk i i hope that you enjoy the rest of the conference as well cheers [Music] uh [Music] [Applause] [Music] hmm [Music] [Music] previously [Music] [Music] previous [Music] whoa [Music] [Applause] [Music] hmm [Music] [Music] previous uh

Channel: The Hacktivists

Views: 594

Rating: 5 out of 5

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Id: q4h8A5dQsZw

Length: 52min 3sec (3123 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 15 2020