Best Cybersecurity Classes Los Angeles, CA: Find Courses & Onsite Training

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What is Cybersecurity?

Cybersecurity, also known as digital security, computer security, or information technology (IT) security, is a term that encompasses a variety of processes and procedures that include analytics, engineering, system architecture, ethical hacking, and incident management. A cybersecurity professional works to protect an organization’s servers, systems, hardware, software, and databases from those who would do it harm. Every business in Los Angeles can benefit from the expertise of security professionals in order to protect its computers from information theft, system disruption, eavesdropping, malware phishing, and other attacks on a system or its users. These attacks are the work of bad actors benefitting from the anonymity of the internet to wreak digital havoc for financial gain, political purposes (cyberwarfare), or, in some cases, just for the thrill of sowing chaos for its own sake.

Cybersecurity is thus the logical and inevitable response to cybercrime or computer crime. Unlike virtual crime, which is crime carried out in virtual environments, inter alia video games, these are crimes that are committed with and often against computers). The first instance of a crime involving information technology goes all the way back to France in 1834, when a pair of thieves stole financial information by intercepting telegraph messages. Computer crime couldn’t really come of age until IT did, which is to say when the internet connected computers that contained more and more sensitive information, especially records of a personal or financial nature. Data, one of the prime targets of computer crime, is a precious commodity, and bad actors can make a considerable financial profit with purloined personal information through such very real crimes as credit card fraud and identity theft. A vast network of computers containing such information is a sitting duck for people with the technological ken to get their sticky fingers into these electronic tills.

As early as 2000, the United Nations (under the guise of its Congress on the Prevention of Crime and Treatment of Offenders) divided cyber crime into five categories: unauthorized access, unauthorized interception of data, sabotage to hinder the functioning of a network or system, destruction of or damage to data or programs, and espionage activities. The problem, which would grow exponentially worse with the propagation of the internet, was already in evidence in the early years of humanity’s online experience. Just 25 years on, estimates state that cybercrime will cost the world $9 trillion in 2024 alone.

The different categories of computer crime can be defined as follows:

Unauthorized access crime is bad actors gaining access to machines and servers to which they have no legal right. That doesn’t necessarily involve criminals sneaking into your laptop through a secret backdoor. Just opening someone else’s computer is a case of unauthorized access, which can result in the theft of personal or financial information. It’s a big enough problem that once-sufficient password authentication is rapidly being superseded by two-step authentication procedures, which require both something you know (your password) and something that is physically in your possession. Most often, that’s going to be your mobile phone, although such devices as dongles (USB tags that function as keys) are in use today, as is biometric scanning of fingerprints and irises.
Unauthorized interception of data includes a whole sub-category of computer crime in which the computer is the tool for fraud rather than the target of a malicious attack. The most frequently encountered example of this is phishing. If you’ve ever received a pop-up telling you that your computer has been infected by a virus and that you need to run a scan that the pop-up window will provide for you, you’ve been phished. And it’s natural to get scared and have the urge to comply with the pop-up: there’s even a term for that impulse: social engineering. Pretty much ten times out of ten, however, the pop-up is part of a latter-day confidence game in which the con artists will try to help themselves to the contents of your wallet. Phishing also includes fraudulent emails that purport to be from a trusted vendor, spear phishing in which an individual is targeted to obtain workplace credentials (which are then used to create a data breach), and link manipulation in which a phishing email includes what looks like a link to a trusted site, but which in reality connects to the phisher’s website with nefarious purposes in mind. MitM attacks also fall under this category: the acronym stands for Man in the Middle and refers to an attack in which someone intervenes in communications between two parties and either alters or just eavesdrops on the conversation (this is easily done on public networks). And, although it’s definitely going old-style in the modern world of computer crime, simple wiretapping also falls under this heading.
Sabotage to hinder the functioning of a network or system is a computer-on-computer attack in which the hardware is the target of the planned malfeasance. One such means of attack here is the denial of service (DoS) attack, in which a computer attempts to flood a server or a network with more traffic than it can possibly handle, causing it either to crash or to be rendered useless A distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack requires multiple machines to achieve its malicious end, often from thousands of so-called zombie” computers that have been infected by malware and whose owners are unaware of what their computers are doing behind their backs. In a Permanent Denial-of-Service attack (PDoS), the goal is to wreck the server that is under attack. Also known as phlashing, PDoS attacks are actually easier to carry out than DDoS attacks, as the malefactors need only target a vulnerability in the system’s underlying software, as opposed to generating enormous quantities of traffic to put the target out of action. There are also DDoS extortion attacks, which generally begin with a minor attack followed by a demand for ransom (generally in pseudonymous bitcoin) to avert a full-scale attack. There is a whole repertoire of DoS attacks, including ones with such fanciful names as smurf, fraggle, nuke, shrew, and RUDY ([a]Re You Dead Yet?) attacks, all of which are variations on this obviously popular theme.
Destruction of or damage to data or programs can be achieved by a number of malicious techniques, including malware, a category of software that includes viruses and worms that can infiltrate a system and render it useless. Also included in this category is hacking into a system to alter data or the computer’s operating system, along with some forms of cyberextortion, especially ransomware, in which malware infects a computer to the extent that it encrypts all the data on a system and demands a ransom for its restoration (or non-destruction). The WannaCry attack of May 2017 was an international affair that affected 200,000 computers in 150 countries, including the computer network of the English and Scottish National Health Services (NHS). The attack was likely the work of North Korea, and, again, demanded payment in bitcoin, which was involved in a large-scale boom at the time. BTC51.623 were collected without, as is the danger in all ransom cases, resulting in the decryption of the hostage data.
Finally, espionage is just what it’s always meant: spying, be it on another company or another country. International espionage, which, depending on which side you’re on, can also be defined as cyberwarfare, is infiltrating a computer or network with the goal of stealing sensitive information. Uber and General Motors have both been accused of being on the receiving end of covert information obtained through the use of fraudulent emails. On an international level, cyberespionage is taking place on a nearly daily basis: The Center for Strategic & International Studies (CSIS) has maintained a list of “significant” cyber incidents since 2006. It currently runs to 91 pages, and, among the entries for January 2024 is a Russian infiltration of the Swedish government network, and one in which Microsoft was the target of a password spraying attack (in which the malicious actor breaches a computer’s defenses by trying the same easy-to-guess password on many accounts, which may sound idiotic, but which works around a potentially highly profitable 1% of the time).

A word on language. Contemporary usage employs the word hacker to describe the malicious actors who hack their way into other people’s computer systems, just as you hack away at a piece of wood with an axe, or at a Thanksgiving turkey with that clumsy appliance known as an electric knife. In the programmer subculture, where the term was first coined back in 1963, hacker simply denoted people who were particularly adept at getting computers to do what they wanted, often by unconventional means. It was a positive term with some libertarian underpinnings. According to this type of hacker, the people who break into other people’s computers with malicious intent are called crackers (as in safe, not as in Ritz). The contemporary media, however, have unanimously adopted hacker to mean cracker. Thus, North Korean hackers started the WannaCry virus, and Marcus Hutchins was the hacker who discovered the kill switch that stopped the virus. This has led to the further distinction of black hat hackers (bad guys, who wore black hats in Western movies) and white hat or “ethical” hackers (good guys who use their skills to stop bad actors). There is a third group of hackers, too: the gray hat ones, whose means for stopping the bad guys aren’t always what might be termed kosher. This last class of hackers can play a crucial role in contemporary cyber counterespionage.

So much for the spectrum of cybercrime, which is constantly evolving and extends beyond the limits of the foregoing discussion. Cybercrimes are being committed at an alarming rate: Estimates from 2024 suggest that 8 million cyber crimes take place in a given year, which comes down to one being committed every 39 seconds.

What’s to be done about it?

Cybersecurity.

There are some 5.5 million cybersecurity professionals worldwide, and that number is regularly lamented to be a shortfall of qualified personnel. The Bureau of Labor Statistics maps 3600 of them, under the rubric of Information Security Analysts, to the Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim statistical region. The amount of money spent domestically on cybersecurity topped $220 billion in 2023, and that number is expected to increase. The diffusion of data in the cloud, the propagation of interconnected toasters and blenders on the internet of things (IoT), and the seemingly unstoppable expansion of wireless devices are so many easy pickings for bad actors, and new measures are ever-necessary to protect the new technology. And, whereas ordinary internet users need only worry about phishing and the like, the stakes are significantly higher for corporations, and higher still for governments.

Just as cybercrime takes a variety of forms, so does cybersecurity. In addition to ethical hacking, cybersecurity comprises defensive measures (vulnerability management), designing systems that are as impervious as possible to attack (security by design, security architecture), hardware protection devices (dongles, for example), so-called digital hygiene (loose lips still sink ships, and network users have to know how to keep passwords and network access secure and not fall victim to the evils of social engineering), and, finally, in the worst-case scenario, the repair of damage once it’s been done. More traditional methods such as anti-virus software, regular updating of operating systems, and firewalls form part of any cybersecurity strategy, even as the field expands to fit the problem.

What Can You Do with Cybersecurity?

An education in cybersecurity, be it a four-year college degree, an associate’s degree, or a bootcamp, will prepare you for a career in this growing field. Bad actors are always trying to find more ways to act badly, and the interests of the better part of humanity need to be protected. As seen above, millions of people are engaged in cybersecurity, and hundreds of billions of dollars are spent on it each year. And, despite all those cybersecurity workers, there is a marked labor shortfall in the field. While the growth in the sector needs to be as high as 12.6% according to some estimates, sector growth for 2023 was only 8.7%. Cutbacks always loom in a slowing economy, but, overall, the forecast for cybersecurity is that it is an understaffed sector, that jobs exist, and that there is every expectation that there will be more jobs in the future.

There is both delineation and overlap in the most commonly encountered cybersecurity roles, which encompass everything from simple IT networking positions to high-level and highly paid security architects, managers, and ethical hackers. (That said, the reward Marcus Hutchins got for his efforts in thwarting the WannaCry attack was a year’s worth of free pizza from Just Eat —and perhaps the sentence of time served he received when he was found guilty in 2019 of creating banking malware while a teenager).

At their finest, cybersecurity professionals can do a great deal to benefit humanity. You may just be the person to save the world from devastating nuclear war with Turkmenistan by foiling the Turkmen computer system just as it’s about to launch missiles armed with nuclear warheads at Grover’s Corners. You can also save your company a lot of money, and do something to spare people the tribulations of identity fraud. It’s primarily a field for the at least somewhat altruistic, although beating the bad guys at their own game can become a sort of esport as well, in which hacker is pitted against hacker and the good guy hats turn from white to grey. The difference from esports is that the stakes are real. You thus can be a very effective ethical hacker and care more about outsmarting your adversary than saving humanity.

Cybersecurity is a field that calls for the exercise of your wits. You need to look for system vulnerabilities using a magnifying glass, put yourself in the shoes of the bad guys, and then come up with solutions that need to be novel if they’re to succeed. You don’t have to be a geek living in a self-built computer lab in your parents’ basement and live on lukewarm pizza and Mountain Dew to work in cybersecurity, but you do need to like computers and learning more about them. Indeed, cybersecurity is a field in which you have to learn something new every day, as both sides of the battle for the soul of the digital world are waged with ever-new ordnance.

What Will I Learn in a Cybersecurity Class?

You can get a cybersecurity credential in three ways. By far, the most usual approach is to obtain a four-year bachelor’s of science degree in cybersecurity or computer science, which will give you a thorough grasp of how computers work, how to program them, how they interact, and round out your education with higher mathematics, and whatever your university or college considers required courses. You’ll probably not get out without having written a paper about Death in Venice, although, by the same token, you probably won’t have to read all 720 pages of The Magic Mountain to get a bachelor’s of science in cybersecurity.

An associate’s degree can also be a starting place for a career in cybersecurity. As it only takes two years to get one, you’re obviously going to cover less academic ground than in a four-year program, which translates to both fewer required courses and fewer courses in your area of specialization. You’ll likely come out with less of a grasp of higher mathematics and fewer programming languages, but with a good deal of knowledge about cybersecurity topics.

A third option for breaking into the field (although, percentage-wise, one taken by considerably fewer candidates than the other two methods) is the so-called bootcamp. These are courses that teach only about cybersecurity, and are designed to get you ready for the job market, more often than not in 24 weeks. Cybersecurity bootcamps can focus on one aspect of the field or cover more facets of the topic, including network and system administration, as well as how to analyze and respond to attacks. Some bootcamps also introduce participants to tools such as Python and its libraries.

With all these possibilities, there’s minimal consensus even on where to begin, although a bootcamp curriculum is likely to start you off by defining what cybersecurity actually entails, and basic security concepts such as the CIA Triad of confidentiality, integrity, and availability. You’ll next learn how systems administration works, which will entail an introduction to Linux, Windows server configuration, command lines, and the Kerberos authentication protocol (which is indeed named after the three-headed hound that guarded the underworld in Greek mythology).

With those fundamental concepts in hand, you’ll proceed to security topics themselves. Those can be divided into two categories: defensive and offensive, both of which are necessary to keeping a network healthy and intruder-free. The defensive side of things includes SIEM (Security Information and Event Management), forensics, and data recovery. Offensive security, for its part, comprises things with arcane names like Burp Suite (a set of programs that can be used for penetration testing; according to its creator, Dafydd Stuttard, it was named burp “for no real good reason”), Zenmap (a beginner’s version of Nmap, a network mapping tool that came by its name more organically), SQL injection (a means of attacking databases by confusing the way in which it is queried) and XSS vulnerabilities and payloads (cross-site scripting, which can be used to redirect the user to a malicious website or to filch a victim’s active cookie with all the personal information it contains).

Other topics can make their way into bootcamp curricula, and the order of presentation can vary from the above. What you should know is that cybersecurity is a vast field, and you can’t learn everything there is to know about it in only six months. You’ll learn a great deal when you’re on the job; the point of a bootcamp is to give you what you need to be able to assume an entry-level role. In addition to learning by doing when you’re working, the field itself is going to keep expanding as the bad guys come up with new and innovative ways of infiltrating your system, and you’re going to have to come up with new and innovative ways of stopping them.

Cybersecurity Industries

Cybercrime is a problem across the internet, be it in the private or public sectors. Whether it be a major Hollywood studio, a small business with no link to the entertainment industry, or even the LAPD, the need for cybersecurity in Los Angeles, as in any global city, is universal. There are probably more cybercriminals trying to steal credit card numbers than there are trying to start a nuclear war, but both require a response. In a way, cybersecurity teams are like any other security team: you’re signing up to be an internet policeman. There is certainly no industry that doesn’t need the services of cybersecurity professionals, unless they’re still running brick-and-mortar businesses that aren’t connected to the internet. Once you hook up your work computer to the web, you’re making your business vulnerable, and you probably shouldn’t wait for there to be a problem before taking steps to secure your customers’ data and your own records.

There are basically three types of enterprises for which you can work as a cybersecurity professional:

The first is as part of the cybersecurity team at a company that keeps an IT department with a cybersecurity division. These jobs can be full-time, or they may involve other IT duties, but, if the business has a dedicated IT department, it’s also going to have people whose job it is to secure the company’s network.
Your second option is to work for a cybersecurity firm that sells its services to companies that don’t have full-time security teams, or that need more sophisticated solutions to security problems than they can provide in-house. This type of consulting is a giant-sized piece of the cybersecurity pie, and there is a lot of money to be made, whether you work for (or start) a small firm, or go to work for huge companies like CISCO, McAfee, or IBM.
Finally, your third option is to go into actual law enforcement in some capacity and become a full-fledged Internet policeman. Many police departments today keep their own digital forensics units. You can also move onto the national stage and work for federal government agencies such as the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the NSA, or even the CIA.

Cybersecurity Jobs

There is a superabundance of terms to define cybersecurity roles. These range from Application Security Administrator to Vulnerability Assessor, with most of the intervening letters of the alphabet covered as well. They can be fanciful (Bug Bounty Hunter, a job for a freelance hacker), almost Bond-like (Counterespionage Analyst), puzzling (Blue Team Member and Red Team Member, i.e., simulating being the good guys and the bad guys, respectively), or decidedly grand like Chief Information Security Officer (that even comes with an acronym CISO and goes to a highly-paid corporate heavyweight).

As far as entry-level situations are concerned, you’ll encounter job titles such as IT Service Analyst (that’s more of a launch pad to a cybersecurity position), Cybersecurity Analyst (one of the first things they have you do is guard the castle ramparts against invaders), which can also be called Security Analyst, Cybersecurity Specialist, or Security Operations Analyst. As a general rule, the more junior positions on the cybersecurity ladder are the Analyst ones, which then move up to jobs with Engineer in the title, then to jobs with Architect, and then to the management roles with Manager in the title. All these jobs are available at companies situated in Greater Los Angeles, although bootcamp graduates will of necessity keep their eyes on entry-level positions. Always read job descriptions carefully: yes, a rose is a rose is a rose, and they all smell sweet, but they don’t all smell the same when it comes to cybersecurity employment.

Cybersecurity Certificates and Certifications

Certificate vs. Certification: What’s the Difference?

The similarity between the words certificate and certification has caused no end of confusion for IT job seekers. The two are actually very different animals, especially in terms of cybersecurity. A certificate is what you receive when you’ve completed your cybersecurity bootcamp: it’s your diploma, and it shows that you’ve attended classes and completed them to your instructors’ satisfaction. Meanwhile, certifications are what you receive when you’ve passed one of many third-party examinations that test your abilities. The difference should be apparent: while a certificate says something about your abilities, a certification proves it. They go under different rubrics on your resume. The certificate goes under education, while the certification goes under skills. The HR person who will scan your resume for all of seven seconds will react differently to certificates and certifications, but the obvious reality is that the certification is by far the more dependably objective yardstick by which to market your abilities.

Cybersecurity Certifications

Although most IT fields offer certificates and certifications, the latter are enormously more important in cybersecurity than elsewhere. While a general rule is that a certification won’t hurt your chances of getting hired but isn’t essential if the rest of your job-search dossier is strong, you basically will stand no chance of getting hired in an entry-level cybersecurity job without the CompTIA Security+ certification on your resume.

The quantity of certifications available in the cybersecurity field can be dizzying. Your initial reaction to all the possibilities is probably going to be feeling that you’re vertiginously perched on a high-dive over a large bowl of room-temperature alphabet soup.

Your first spoonful of alphabet noodles is going to spell CompTIA, the Computing Technology Industry Education, a non-profit that offers vendor-neutral certifications across the full spectrum of IT. These are widely respected, and are as close to an industry-standard as can be found. The CompTIA, which has a mania for putting + at the end of its certifications’ names, leads off with the CompTIA A+, a certification of the candidate’s abilities in installing and repairing PCs. It’s not a bad thing to have if you’re going into cybersecurity, but it’s not the digital badge you need to get hired. That would be the CompTIA Security+, which is the entry-level certification specifically geared towards cybersecurity. A further entry-level certification from CompTIA is the CompTIA PenTest+, which tests your knowledge of penetration testing, a “red team” activity that involves attempting to break through your own company’s system’s defenses in order to ensure that the walls of the cybercastle are intact. The CompTIA Security+ is priced at $404. A wealth of preparatory materials for the exam is available: CompTIA’s complete bundle of learning materials, along with an exam voucher and a free retake, comes in at $1,111.

A rival to CompTIA is GIAC (pronounced GEE-ack, to rhyme with short stack), the Global Information Assurance Certification. As of 2023, it has revised its certification path, and now offers over 40 different GIAC Practitioner Certifications, along with a new set of Applied Knowledge Certifications for those who are considerably advanced in their careers. The certifications are stackable, and if you get enough of them, you can get certified as a GSE, a Global Security Expert. But that’s a long way off from a cybersecurity bootcamp. The certification journey begins, rather, with the GISF (GIAC Information Security Fundamentals; note that GIAC considers all its acronyms to be pronounceable as words). More advanced, but still suited to people at the beginnings of their careers, is the GSEC (GIAC Security Essentials), which is designed with cybersecurity specialists in mind, whereas the knowledge required for the GISF is generally applicable to most IT roles, not only those explicitly involved with security. Further certifications available to people further along in their careers include GX-PT (GIAC Experienced Penetration Tester, GMLE (GIAC Machine Learning Engineer), and GDSA (GIAC Defensible Security Architect Certification). GIAC offers affiliate exam preparation training through the SANS Institute. The GISF exam lasts from two to three hours and doesn’t come cheap: the price of the exam is $949, including two practice tests to determine whether you’re ready to stand for the real thing.

A third organization that offers up steaming bowls of alphabet soup to the candidates for its cybersecurity certifications is the International Information System Security Certification Consortium (that mouthful is abbreviated ISC2). Their starter certification is CC (which stands for Certified in Cybersecurity), which is offered for free as part of the organization’s efforts to help close the employment gap that is such a prominent feature of the cybersecurity landscape. The CC opens the doors to their vast family of other certifications. The ISC2 Systems Security Certified Practitioner (SSCP), which concentrates on the network aspects of cybersecurity, requires a year’s work experience and is the next step on the path. Cloud Security (CCSP), Security Architecture (ISSAP), and Security Engineering (ISSEP) lie among the more advanced certifications you can obtain as your career progresses. The ISC2 offers education and training in many different forms (online, classroom, self-paced) in preparation for its exams.

Another option, known only by its acronym, is the ISACA (it won’t be on the test, but that stands for International Information Systems and Audit Control Association). It offers its own entry-level certification, the Cybersecurity Fundamentals Certificate. (Just to confuse everyone further, they call this a certificate, but it is indeed a certification). The exam has no prerequisites, lasts two hours, and initiates you into a whole other world of certificates and certifications. An online course and study guide are available (at a charge) in preparation for the test. ISACA members receive a substantial discount on these, as well as on the exam voucher, which costs $199 but only $150 for members.

Another possibility to bear in mind is the EC-Council (International Council of ecommerce Consultants) and its Certified Ethical Hacker (C|EH) certification. It’s one of a number of certifications provided by the EC-Council, all of which are distinguished by a vertical bar in the acronym. C|EH isn’t for people just starting out, especially if they’re fresh out of a bootcamp, as the EC-Council recommends that candidates for the exam be proficient in several coding languages, including Python, SQL, and C++. It is, however, a highly valuable certification when you obtain it, not least of all if your ambitions lie in the direction of ethical hacking per se. EC-Council has a number of training schemes to go along with the exam, which itself costs $1,199, not including a $100 application fee and whatever training options you might select.

How do you make your way through all these certifications (of which the above is nothing like an exhaustive list)? Perhaps the best advice is to take a look at job descriptions, and see what jobs call for which certifications. You’ll need to do some research before you can choose a certification path; do it with all due diligence. You’re going to be investing a substantial sum of money in the exam(s) you choose to take, and your future is going to depend on it. You’ll also have to accept that an ongoing series of stackable certifications is going to be in your professional future, so you might as well get used to them early on.

Is it worth it to learn cybersecurity?

If you’re in the market for a well-paid field in which there’s an abundance of jobs—indeed, in which there is a sizable gap between qualified candidates and vacant situations—then cybersecurity might be a good fit for you. As bad actors trying to get something for nothing (or start a nuclear war) aren’t going to disappear, the field isn’t going to disappear, either. You’ll also be doing something for which there is a real need, since, as more and more of twenty-first-century life shifts online (until the vending machines take over), there’ll be even more need to keep the people using the internet safe. Cybersecurity is an altruistic calling at heart: even if you don’t work in the law enforcement part of the field, practicing your trade is still a way of helping people by stopping the bad guys. It’s a form of altruism you can practice from just about anywhere, often with minimal contact with other people, just in case you’re the “I love mankind —it’s people I can’t stand” kind of altruist. You’ll also be solving problems on a regular basis; if that appeals to you, you’ll probably enjoy working in the cybersecurity sector.

Although they cost less than a college education, bootcamps aren’t exactly inexpensive. And certification will probably involve another thousand dollars before you’re through. On the other hand, the rewards at the other end can be considerable: Cybersecurity Analyst salaries in Los Angeles can run from $92,000 into the six figures. And while you probably won’t be making that much when you’re hired for your first job, those salaries will be clearly in view from the time you start your cybersecurity career. Ultimately, the decision between the expense of retooling yourself and potential gains when you’ve finished your training is one you’ll have to make for yourself. If you have settled on a career in IT or tech, however, cybersecurity makes an excellent choice of specialization.

How long will it take to learn cybersecurity?

Cybersecurity is a field that calls for a lifetime of study. The bad guys are going to be looking for vulnerabilities in new technologies, and that means that cybersecurity professionals have constantly to stay on top of their game, especially as the bad guys are often a step ahead of them. So don’t expect to be able to say that you’ve finished your cybersecurity education. This is one of the reasons why there are advanced certifications: they’re there to make sure that the good guys know everything they need to know to be effective.

The usual path to an education in cybersecurity is a four-year degree in cybersecurity, or, if you want to be more of a generalist, computer science. You can also extend that into a master’s degree in cybersecurity; that can be handy if you have a more generalized computer science degree and decide to specialize after graduation. Thus, the first answer to how long it will take to learn cybersecurity is four to five years.

A bachelor’s degree isn’t the only way to get your foot in the cybersecurity door, however. You can make the jump to the job force more quickly with a two-year associate’s degree in cybersecurity, some programs for which can be found online. If you don’t have two years to devote to full-time study, you can also consider a bootcamp. Bootcamps are targeted classes that eliminate things like required courses in areas outside of the subject you intend to study. Cybersecurity bootcamps are among the longer ones to be found, as there is a great deal of involved technical material you have to know to be effective in the field. They generally last six months (24 weeks) if you work at them full-time. That’s still a sizable time commitment, but cybersecurity isn’t a field you can fake your way through by pushing buttons at random the way you can with software like Word or even Excel. There are a lot of computer science principles you have to learn in cybersecurity, and that’s not the kind of thing at which you can guess. So you do have to be willing to commit to training of some length if you’re to learn what you need to know to secure an entry-level role.

Is it Hard to Learn Cybersecurity?

Whether something is easy or hard to learn depends on you first of all, and, second of all, on how your brain is configured for the acquisition of new information. Cybersecurity is a field that calls for the ability to learn a lot of highly logical computer operations: you’ll be working with the guts of the networks and machines you’re trying to protect, and those guts don’t exactly speak English. And, if you don’t understand how a computer works, you’re not going to be worth much when it comes to trying to rescue them from North Korea’s RGB.

The reality is that there are things that are easier to learn than cybersecurity. If you don’t want to get your hands dirty with computer science concepts, you might do well to look elsewhere. If you don’t like solving problems and riddles, you may also not have your ideal career in cybersecurity. On the other hand, if those things do appeal to you, and you like being a good guy, you should enjoy and be able to learn cybersecurity.

What Else Can I Learn Alongside Cybersecurity?

The answer here is that the more you know about computers, the more effective you’ll be working in cybersecurity. That’s one reason why you can spend four to five years at university learning what you need to know to start a career. Thus, in addition to cybersecurity itself, the best thing you can learn is computer languages. An excellent place to begin would be Python, as it is the language most used in cybersecurity applications. Python comes complete with code libraries designed to help with security operations, including Scapy (network analysis), Faker (a fake data creator), and Pycrypto (cryptography and encryption). Other languages you can learn that will serve you well in your cybersecurity career include SQL, C++, and even the less user-friendly C.

A further subject that won’t hurt you in a cybersecurity career is network administration. The more you know about that, the more effective you’ll be when it comes to defending networks against intruders. You might even give the CompTIA Network+ certification a look; if nothing else, the experience with CompTIA exams will prepare you for the CompTIA Security+ test.

How Should I Learn Cybersecurity?

The world today presents a number of ways to learn just about anything, with the major fork in the road coming between in-person and online instruction. The internet can be a wonderful way to learn everything from how to make the perfect egg fried rice to…things you’re not supposed to make. Cybersecurity isn’t egg fried rice, however, and some ways of learning it are better than others.

Should I learn Cybersecurity in Person or Online?

With online education having reached a level of sophistication it lacked in its earlier years, the internet offers teaching that is fully comparable to what you can obtain in a live class. Indeed, many internet classes are fully live, with the teacher available in real-time: if you have a question, you need but raise your hand to ask it, just as though you were in a physical classroom.

The choice between live online and live in-person depends on two factors: the availability of in-person instruction in your locality and your own personal learning style. In Los Angeles, it also depends on your ability to tolerate freeway traffic to get to your class. Certificate (i.e., non-degree) programs are to be had from the likes of UCLA Extension, Los Angeles Community College, or Cal State Long Beach, each of which offers its own brand of freeway headache. These courses can be taken online from home, without having to get into the car, pay a fortune for gas, and sit in traffic. That said, there are people who don’t like the idea of online learning. While no one likes the idea of braving the 10, the 101, or the 710 during a rush hour that extends from 6:00 a.m. to midnight, you may still feel more comfortable with the idea of being in the same physical space as your instructor. That is, after all, how most of your school experience unfolded, and you may simply just prefer that familiarity to the convenience of learning online.

Can I learn Cybersecurity for Free?

In a word, no.

Yes, you’ll find videos on YouTube that claim to be complete courses in cybersecurity in 11 hours, or ethical hacking in 12. There’s even a Cyber Security in 7 Minutes video. But you can’t learn even basic cybersecurity in the time you need to fly to Paris from LAX. On top of that, you’ll encounter a problem that is endemic to YouTube tutorials: once they’ve been uploaded, they just sit there, collecting cyberdust until way past their “sell by” date. In a field that develops as quickly as cybersecurity, something that was filmed three years ago isn’t going to be much of a building block for a new career.

That said, YouTube videos can be a very effective means of letting you gauge whether cybersecurity is for you in the first place. They can also show you a few of the basics, so that, if you decide that you do want to sign up for a bootcamp, you’ll know what the teacher is talking about on the first day of the class. It’s always good to do research, and these videos are a very painless way of doing it.

Although the free approach isn’t going to work in a field such as cybersecurity, you can spend relatively little on a self-paced, on-demand course. An example (not surprisingly, it’s the first result you get on Google when you search on cybersecurity) is a Google certificate program that is available through Coursera. It’s to be had, along with the rest of Coursera’s career-minded content, as inexpensively as $399 per year if paid in an annual lump sum. That’s only one of the many self-paced courses the internet makes available.

Advantages of Learning with a Live Teacher

While self-paced learning isn’t a bad thing in and of itself, its limitations become veritable shortcomings when the subject matter is involved or complicated. Cybersecurity is such a field, and the inevitability is that you’re going to come upon something in an on-demand video tutorial at 2:00 a.m. that you don’t understand, and you’ll have no way of asking another human to explain it.

A live class is going to offer you that precious possibility. Indeed, it’s not a luxury with something like cybersecurity when you have to assimilate a great deal of material that must be as up-to-date as possible. (There’s little sense in learning how to stop cyberattacks that were stopped ten years ago). In a live class, the instructor can also tailor the lesson’s pace to the students, and keep track of their work by looking at their screens. This last feature is possible for remote students in a virtual classroom as well, but can only be done with the student’s permission. The proponents of AI notwithstanding, nothing can replace a human teacher. Whether you decide to take a live class in person or across the miles is a question of personal style: the choice is more subjective than anything else. The choice between a live cybersecurity course and a self-paced one is, on the other hand, decidedly more objective.

Corporate Cybersecurity Training

Do you wish your team were more up-to-date on all things cybersecurity? You may not want to train your entire staff to become certified ethical hackers, but you may well need them to know more about the subject, given how pressing cybersecurity concerns are today. Noble Desktop can arrange custom-tailored cybersecurity classes for your organization or team. You can choose the curriculum in consultation with Noble’s expert instructors and have your employees learn exactly what you need them to learn. Classes can take place on your premises, or the class can be served up using any one of a number of teleconferencing platforms. A further option is having your team attend one of Noble’s regularly scheduled classes on the subject; discounts are available for multiple voucher purchases. Please contact a member of Noble Desktop’s corporate sales department for additional details.

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