How I Started my Journey in Cybersecurity

I was interested in hacking since I was in the 9th standard. I remember how I used to search online for hacking tricks, and I also bought one or two books of hacking by Ankit Fadia as I didn’t know much about the field. So I could say that my journey in this field started right here. At this point for me, cybersecurity was just hacking.

But my primary motivation in this field came after attending a workshop on Ethical Hacking that was conducted by Lucideus Tech in my city. I remember the workshop very well, and it changed my perception of cybersecurity. I was in the 11th standard at that time. I was motivated and excited about the workshop. They taught us most of the entry-level topics of ethical hacking like information gathering, basics of networking and web technologies, email security, and much more. Here, I realized that cybersecurity is not just hacking and much more. I started learning more about this field. I enjoyed every part of it, and it was then that I made up my mind that this is what I will do for the rest of my life.

After that point in my life, I started to learn on my own. I learned different topics from different websites and books. Initially, I began with networking basics and moved on to more important topics like pen-testing, wifi security, network security, and web security. I took some training from different institutions and the rest I did from research on my own. I did most of my courses from Cybrary, edX, and Coursera. These websites helped me a lot in my learning process.

As I started learning to program when I was in 6th grade, I had the necessary programming skills when I began my journey into cybersecurity. Moreover, my college played a significant part in teaching us various programming languages in detail, which was very helpful in building my programming logic, which later helped me in cybersecurity.

I started attending different seminars on cybersecurity, including Null chapter meets, Hakon, Besides, Nullcon, etc. They are a great place to meet new people and professionals in cybersecurity and get to know new things in this field. I also started solving CTFs, cracking VulnHub machines, some bug bounty, and doing more challenges like these. In short, I did almost everything related to offensive security and red teaming.

I have delivered several seminars and workshops to students from different schools and colleges. I have also given small talks at Null Pune chapter meets on topics like Intro to Network VAPT, OSINT, and Bitcoin Forensics. My main motto is to teach others in this field and motivate people to see the real picture of what this field can bring to this world in the right way and a wrong way.

I started researching this field when I was interning at Volon Cyber Security during my 3rd year of B.Tech. I was introduced to Threat Intelligence here, and from there on, my interests started developing in Threat Intelligence. Moreover, I also did a research project on Threat Intelligence in my final year of B.Tech.

Currently, I am pursuing my MS in Cybersecurity from Georgia Tech. I am still researching in Threat Intelligence with Prof. Paul Pearce. I enjoy working in this area of cybersecurity, and I love every aspect of it. In a way, I moved from the Offensive side of security to the Defensive side. I am active on Quora answering many cybersecurity-related questions and am also volunteering as a teaching assistant at Cybrary. I have been attending a lot of conferences starting this year, including BSides Tampa, BSides Atlanta, ComfyCon AU, IntroSecCon, VirSecCon, and many more.

I occasionally play CTFs and am learning many new things in the cybersecurity domain every day. I am passionate about giving back to the community and helping others get into this field.