A (63:05)
I have some thoughts about the news. It's called let's go to the hotline. That's going to do it for today's news. Guys, I hope you got value from it. If you were here for the first time. Come on back tomorrow. Sam Crow. I hope you enjoyed the audio visual experience. Shout out to Space Tacos for being our Simply Cyber Community Member of the Week. Honorable mention for Shimeria Gonzalez, who's at In Chat right now. If you do at chi, she'll pop up. She was involved with the Simply Cyber newsletter. If you did not know. I don't really talk about it very often, but if you go to Simply Cyber IO newsletter, you'll see that we actually have a newsletter that comes out every single Monday. We've been doing it for like four or five years. And it's literally got three pieces of actionable intel, one for your end users, one for your IT counterparts, one for your executives. And in a lot of instances, you can literally just copy and paste it. It's yet another piece of value that I forget to tell people about that we offer to you as Simply Cyber Community members. I will tell you that there is like, like there's usually like a sponsor graphic at the top, the newsletter for those who do not know or are remotely interested. The newsletter costs me about 200 bucks a month because of the platform we use and just the sheer volume of people who sign up for it. So I don't want to just absorb those costs. I absorb the cost for years. So there's like a sponsored thing. All right, guys, let's get out of here. I'm Jerry from Simply Cyber. If you gotta go, go. But let me tell you one thing that's pretty dope. If you can stay. We're about to do Cyber Career hotline Phone line here. Get this smooth Lo Fi. Listen. Cyber career hotline. Your questions, my answers. Phone lines are open now. Drop your questions in chat. Let's get into it. I'm Dr. Gerald Osher. This is the Cyber Career Hotline. If you're building a career in cyber security, this show is for you. Let's get into it. All right, everybody, it's all about good times. We try not to take ourselves too seriously here, but it is really fun. If you have a question in chat, put it in there with a Q and I will answer it to the best of my ability. I'm scrolling to the bottom. I saw Marcus Kyler with the Yeet crew, by the way, drop a question. I'm gonna end the poll really quickly. The poll was, is it okay to work from anywhere if you are a remote worker? Chad is pretty divided on this one. 68 Yes, 32 no. So not a slam dunk one way or the other. Some things people were citing around cross country borders. Data regulation, secure connections, etc. So interesting. All right, first question coming out the gate is from my friend Marcus Kyler. Marcus and I have been friends for about three years now. Per the first story, we constantly make fun of businesses who offer free ID protection. Say your security is important to us. What would be a substantive and meaningful response? I mean, honestly, Marcus, it. What would be a meaningful response? I mean, you're going to have to offer it anyways. I mean, if you wanted to be more accountable, you could include what you'd be doing in order to, to prevent it from the future from happening in the future. There are some companies that do get in front of it. So I, I don't. Here's the thing. I've seen companies not offer the identity protection and I've still felt okay about it because I don't really know how super valuable that is. And maybe not your security is important to us. But like, you know, how about like we have a robust approach to cybersecurity, but we're not capable, like any business, to eliminate all risk. We're going to evaluate, you know, from this particular incident to ensure that. One second. I have a UPS connected to my, like my NAS and my workstation are all plugged into a ups, which is like a battery backup slash, you know, bat a business continuity thing. So if we lose power, I can gracefully shut down and it's click. It's like clicking right now. It hasn't made noise in like a year. There's also no visual indicators. It's just like a mechanical click. So anyways, that. That's what I would do, Marcus, in this situation. It is tough, though, when you're a publicly traded company. You know, it happen. Marcus says he sees companies get slammed for not offering it. That's interesting. Noah says, I'm breaking into the industry. I just got my SEC plus, no cyber experience with past jobs. How do I best showcase my skills? Yeah. Okay, so here's what I would say on this one, Noah. Number one, get a website, right? You can do free ones. Like there's get hub pages or get pages. Look at dj, DJ bio website as an example. Put that. Put the home lab, put the cert, kind of have a landing page, do some social. Do. Do consistent social media posts on the work you're doing. You want to kind of have a. Whatever job you're going for, make sure that whatever experience you're developing or skills you're developing are aligned towards that job. And then finally, You should be networking. I mean, you're here right now, Noah. But lots of jobs. Lots of jobs, guys. And Noah, lots of jobs, especially in cybersecurity, are never published, right? Or if they are published because they have to be, they may already be hardwired, meaning hardwired for somebody. Meaning, like, I already know I'm giving this job to Joseph, but because HR says I have to post it for two weeks, I'll post it for two weeks, get a bunch of interview. Get a bunch of resumes. Maybe I have to interview people. I'll interview three people and then give the job to Joseph. You know what I mean? Like, so by networking, you can establish those relationships and find out about opportunities. And it's not about getting a job you don't deserve, okay? It's just having a relationship. Marcus Kyler is saying you got to offer the identity theft protection, but you got to go further in the response. I agree. Even the letters you get, you know, when you get identity theft protection, the letters you get are kind of weak sauce as well. Space Saco says if you'd like to see the company just say they had a problem, they're working to fix it, and they're sorry for the drama when it comes to security breach just once. There you go. All right. Sierra Montgomery's got to go. Have a nice week. Jesse Johnson returning to Slay Secure Slay cert. I believe he's doing that with Tech Ricky now. He can come on tomorrow on Tuesday. And share more about that fun fact. I played Magic the Gathering on spell table with casually Joseph Yesterday, he absolutely pantsed me with a merfolk deck. What else? If you got questions in chat, this is Cyber Career hotline. It's a 30 minute show from 9am to 9:30am Eastern time, Monday through Friday where we do everything in our power to answer your questions. Chris M. Says with looking at bad all day, what tool suggested to get out of the funk, questioning if I can mentally handle it and cyber security is right for me? Yeah, I mean, I mean, I don't know, it's like in our industry, it's not like we're looking at like things that give you nightmares. I mean the, you know, the seriousness is real. But I, I don't know, I guess it's just you get, in my opinion, Chris, you just get desensitized to it because you see it all the time. Not to mention like, you know, I feel like there's a lot of hype around attacks and all these things and like when you see enough of them, like, you can kind of like take a measured approach to them. I think, I think anyone can handle cyber security if they like it. Here's the thing, Chris, and I'll say this to everybody. I've said this before, so you may have already heard this, so you know, bear with me. But like if you want to work in cybersecurity, you, whoever you are, I'm talking to you. If you want to work in cyber security, you can absolutely work in cybersecurity. And the entire mission of simply cyber is to provide support and empower you to achieve those goals. Now having said that, cyber security isn't for everyone. And I'm not trying to say it's not for you. I'm not trying to say we've got enough people, you can move along. What I'm saying is in, in my opinion, this is a hot, I mean, squad members, if we can get a tinfoil hat, please, this is a tinfoil hat comment. In my opinion, cyber security is a lifestyle and I know that that's asking a lot. But just like the people that I see that don't get toasted by cyber, the people who like thrive, they typically, it's typically like more than a job. It's like they're into it, they're into cyber security. Like how attacks work is interesting. New techniques is interesting. Ways to defend is interesting. And because of that interest, you never really get broken. I mean you can burn out by overworking, but like, it's just, you never get satisfied where you're like, ugh, Gross. I don't want to go to work because I, you know, I'm not interested. Like, to me like that, that's like cyber security is constantly, constantly changing. Constantly. And if you, if you like that it's a new day every day, then you, sir, you, you, you, you thrive. And if you're like, oh, my God, like, I barely can keep up it, you'll have a tough time. So again, Chris, I'm not saying you can handle it or not handle it. I'm just trying to lay out, like, at a macro level what my experience is. And this is a real topic that I would love the simply cyber community member you to drop your thoughts in chat about, because it's a serious topic, man. Some people spend years trying to break in and then they, they're like, oh, I don't like this job. You know what I mean? All right, All right. So continuing to look through chat. Jesse, There's Jesse. Jesse's saying, let's go. Trap Create says, how does one narrow down a niche in it when it, when it's all interesting? Oh, yeah, no, no, for sure, dude. Cyber security is interesting. I love it. What I would say is, don't a lot of people, like, casually Joseph, not to, like, dox him right here, but casually Joseph is kind of going through this struggle right now. Sorry, Joseph, I'm just gonna air this. But I think it's something that you would tell other people. Guys, don't get sweaty and worried about the process. Most people, Most people, when they work in industry one to three years, like, they're. You start getting your first job, and then, yeah, up to three years, you are, like, doing all the things right. Maybe you're professionally doing soc analyst work, but you're also dabbling with, like, GRC or CFP or capture the flags or Red Team or reversing or ida. You're playing with different things. You're getting experience, you're learning about new things all the time. Then between like the years of like, three to six, four to six, that's when you start leaning into a specific niche. Now, this niche can come just by virtue of your job, virtue of your opportunities, virtue of where you're passionate and you're able to, like, double down on it. And then once you do that, trap creates, that's where you're going to get that niche. And then, you know, 6 to 10, you start becoming a subject matter expert in that niche. All right, so as far as narrowing down goes, the question is, how does one narrow down? What I would say is look at the intersection, the Venn diagram, if you will, of like what you have opportunity to do typically professionally or through an outlet that allows you to develop professionally, meaning professional talks, collaborations with other work researchers, you know your thesis for a master's degree or whatever. Take that and then overlay it with like what you're passionate about and lean into that. That's how I would narrow it down. Listen, I got a master's in computer science in like 2004 or six or something, I can't remember but. And I did my thesis on wireless security and I like drove around with like wardrobe. I was like war driving with like a antenna out my car and I was collecting all this information. I was doing analysis on the overall, you know, with a large enough data set, what is the macro level view of, of residential wireless networks etc. And I, I loved it. I loved it. Do you know how much I do with wireless networks now? Zero. I own a WI fi pineapple and it's still in the box. You know what I mean? So don't, don't, don't overthink it. Don't get overwhelmed. Like go to the buffet. Try all the things. If you like something, go back and eat a little bit more. But don't be beholden to it. All of it, no matter what you're doing, trap creates, all of it is going to be able to support whatever you end up doing long term. All right. Continuing to look through chat. Cyber Shinigami. Anyone know of any network engineering jobs or connects I can share with former colleague who was unexpectedly laid off? That sucks. I guess just PSA here. If anyone knows anything for sure, drop it in here. Let's see. Continuing to look through chat. This is cyber Career hotline. Phone lines are open, Proverbial phone lines. Just ask questions and I'll answer. E.K. berger says, I think this is a question. It doesn't start with a Q, but it kind of had a question vibe. It is the current events, especially you work at. Okay, never mind. It wasn't a question. All right, I'm, I'm going back to only looking for things that start with a Q. Bearded ruckus. Bearded ruckus. Bring them ruckus. All right. With all the expectations required in the field in these times, do you think that this is to weed out some people to correct the market with all the expectations required in the field in these times? No, I don't think it's that. I think it's just. I, I mean, I don't think it's the weed out people to correct the market. I don't think the market needs a correction. I think there's more people than there is opportunities. Despite the fact that reports will say that there's more opportunities, I don't think it's the weed out. I just think some. Some organizations don't understand the value of cyber security. Right. They know they need I t. They don't necessarily understand cyber. It's becoming more and more apparent that you do need it. But I. I don't think it's to weed out anyone. Continue to look through chat. All right, so this isn't a question, but because I did like disclose casually Joseph's private journey. Thank you, Joseph, for sharing. Plus, I didn't think you would care me sharing that, so I did it. Talking about. Talking about niching down. He says what he's been doing is trying to identify upcoming needs and see whether it intersects with his interests. And that makes it easier. And of course you can always switch your niche later on for sure. Like most things that you do aren't going to be invalid or not add value to you as a professional. So that's the silver lining. All right. Oh, we are caught up on chat. Nice. If you have questions, put it in queue. This is Cyber Career Hotline. Phone lines are open. I love this, by the way, just so people know if you're a long timer. I rebranded the name to ow. I rebranded the name to Cyber Career hotline. Just so the title of the show is very obvious what we're doing here. Jawjacking did not indicate that we were helping people with their Cyber Career Hotline would suggest Q A. It also plays into like that 90s vibe. So that's why we changed it. Question coming in from Kyle. Kyle, how do you know you're ready to take the S.I.S. b for S.E.C. plus, wait until I got a 90. Yeah, I mean, that sounds like a pretty good barometer. If you can get a 90 on a practice test, go sit for it. Dude, the CIS P is like 600 bucks or something like that. Or it used to be back in my day. So, like, I don't want to just piss away 600 bucks. So I. I want to guarantee that I'm going to nail it. You know what I mean? All right. Hey, really quick, just to share another fun thing. Simply, Cybercon is coming November 8th and 9th. You can register now. Many of you are already registering. FYI, we only are going to allow like a hundred And I think 17 people at the event because, you know, obviously it's a smaller venue. If you want to learn about it, come on down. Simply cybercon.org if you'd like to speak. CFP is going to open in mid May. I want everyone to know that we only have 11 speaking slots for this year. 11. So we're going to definitely get more than 11 people submitting to speak. So we're going to do a blind review. So there will be no. No nepotism, no favoritism, no. No influence, no thumb on the scale. It will be blind review by a panel. Also, Justin Gold has done some work. Hopefully that spot. Justin, can I get an update on the sponsorship package, please? The sponsorship package is almost available. Almost ready. So if you. If your organization is looking to sponsor Simply Cybercon for sure, let us know. We also are. Somebody already reached out to me. There will be a slot for some workshops. I think we have slots for four workshops. So if you organization wanted to do a sponsored workshop, we would certainly welcome you into that. Dude. Stones fan Rob Cooper bringing the heat. This guy lived at the Sphere for fish three day concert. Like an absolute boss. Rob, how was the. How was fish, dude? Fish with a ph. Concerts, if you're interested in concerts. Charleston, South Carolina does have a couple good venues. We have this like tennis stadium, stadium on Daniel island that gets things like, you know, Darius Rucker or Chris Stapleton. We have North Charleston Performing Arts center that gets some concerts. Meh. And then we actually have downtown the Music Farm where I saw AWOL Nation live back in like 2011. AWOL Nation sick concert. A little bit of a one hit wonder, but I gotta tell you, they were a solid, solid live concert. All right, Funky Monk, you're welcome for the news. Phil Stafford says CIS P is $750 just to age myself. When I took the CISSP, it was a paper exam. Oh my God, you're old. Yes, that's right. I had to get a number two pencil and fill out a scantron test. Oh yeah, Firefly Distillery. I forgot about that Firefly Distillery. They had OAR in Dispatch, I think recently. Berlinda says, what's your coffee brand? I'm kind of a basic B Berlinda, but I just drink Starbucks French roast. You know why? I'll tell you why. I do Starbucks French Roast. Actually, not even. I used to do like I do Kirkland signature French Roast. Costco. For me, in my money, I could buy 10 pounds of it for like 60 bucks, 70 bucks. I have coffee for months. It tastes the same every day. It's good. It's good enough. So that's. That's what I drink Kirkland Signature Costco's French Roast. I, you know, occasionally when I go out to like a coffee shop to meet someone or cafe, I'll get a cappuccino or I'll get a coffee and I enjoy it. But for the most part, you know what I like? I like consistency and not having to make choices in the morning. I like to not think about my coffee. All right. Okay. So Stones fan said fish was awesome. I've been to a movie at the Sphere. It was an awful movie but I would love to see a music concert there, I'll tell you that. By the way, if you're wondering, the movie was called Postcards from Home or Postcards from Earth or something like that. It was basically like a 90 minute visual, visual experience that was amazing. But the entire premise of the movie is to make you feel like a, a parasite as a human being. So I, you know, I felt like, I felt terrible about myself when I left. Video was cool. But the thing is I grew up in Boston, dude. We had the Museum of Science Omni Theater like back in the 90s. We did domes before the Sphere was even like considered. Berg, SSJ says anyone have a portfolio or website or projects I can check out? I got one for you Berg. Come check out this. This is like hands down the number one end all, be all option. DJ B sec my guy dj b sec.com this guy right here at Berg. Check this out. Ben Cheryl aka DJ B Sec. This is his website. It is hosted on GitHub Get Pages. He's done the domain name redirect so he owns dj bsec.com. you can't see it on chat but look at this. He's got his background, he's got his security intel, he's got his YouTube, Tik Tok, LinkedIn, GitHub. Dude, nice clean look. Love it, love it, love it, love it. This guy, he's jamming, man. He's like Bob Marley, he's jamming. And Burke, he wants you to be jamming with him too. Lol. Oh also can I just share a quick fun one? Bilbo, the real Bilbo actually turned me on to like a really great band. Hold on. Yeah, check this out guys. This is your playlist for today. Revolution. If you're into like the modern new wave reggae, like stick figure Revolution is another one of these real Bilbo turned me on to these guys. If you want to just kind of like vibe out and like get some work done today but have like modern reggae on it Says rock music band. But it's, you know, if you live in a state that is like, legalized medic. Like recreational use of plants, revolution might be what you do on Saturday. It's definitely cool. I like it. All right, what else we got? I got 1 minute, 45 seconds left, guys. Christopher, Lycia knows about revolution. DJ B Sec is in the chat. Marcus Kyler's keeping my. My guy reference count. Thank you, Marcus. James McQuiggin saw the Eagles at the Sphere. Super sick. All right, guys, here we go. It is not yacht rock is. I don't know. I can't even afford a dinghy. Kyle. Kyle. So I don't know what yacht rock is. All right, guys, I'm Jerry from Simply Cyber. Hey, let me really quick give you guys some quick. If you're still here. If you're still here, I consider you like hardcore Simply Cyber community members. I just want to provide a couple updates because I did some work over. I did some work over the weekend. And this isn't to like. This is more just to make you guys aware. Let's not to scare you or whatever. We are. It's. It's April 27th. We're about to enter the summer. I have a lot, lot going on in the next couple months. Like, so much that I had to sit down with like, a paper 2026 calendar and use a highlighter and like, highlight, you know, hard commitments. I penciled in soft commitments, made some like, dude, it's gonna be bananas. It's gonna be very demanding on myself, very demanding on my family. And we will, you know, obviously everything's going to continue with Simply Cyber. Don't get sweaty on that. But I just want to make everybody aware. So will be traveling quite a bit as a family. So we're going to be going back to Georgia for a week. I may be moving to Georgia. Just so everyone knows. Like, I guess just to share inside secrets with you. I'm going to Las Vegas at the end of May for Cisco Live. I'm going obviously to Black Hat defcon. We're taking a. We take a family vacate or we take a family trip with another family at the end of June every year. So if you've been a regular, you know that I'm gonna have to get coverage for daily Cyber threat brief that week. So you'll have a guest host for a week. Details to follow on that. We're going to be driving up and down the co. The. The. The East Coast. Like, 4th of July is going to be 4th of July is on a Saturday, but I think that Friday is the third, and that's. That might be not a day. So, anyways, there's just a lot coming up. It's always busy in the summer, and I want to be very, very clear to everybody, let you all know. All right? Because, you know, yes, I run the show, and it's my thing and whatever, but. But it's a community, guys. It takes a village. And when. When there's really disruptive things, I want to be really clear and communicative with you guys. All right? Happy anniversary to Phil Stafford. So Cyber Risk, which X asks a good question. Would you move Simply Cybercon? You know, I don't think so. I don't know. Cyber Risk, which we would have to decide, like, where we're looking to move in Georgia. Like, doesn't even show up on a map. So, like. Like, bringing you guys there probably wouldn't be good. I really, like, I'm. I'm, like, excited to move, but I really love the Charleston area and Folly Beach. So if. If this conference works this year, coming at Folly beach, if it's, like, a great venue and everybody loves it, which I think it's, like, a perfect spot for what I'm trying to achieve, then, I mean, I don't mind coming back. Like, I. I would come back. It'd be a great reason to come back to the low country, so I don't think it would change. But, you know, we would be an hour outside of Atlanta, so, you know, maybe. Maybe it does. I don't know. Let's. I. We don't even know if we're moving yet, so. So, Rich. Okay, now we're in bonus time. Rich says, what would happen in the studio? So get this. This is part of the deal. Like, where we're looking. We would own a lot of land. Okay? And I already thought about this. I was talking to Mrs. Ozier about it. Like, I think what I'm gonna end up doing is building, like, one of those, like, metal space buildings. Like, it'll be like a proper studio with, like, it'll. It'll be bigger than the Buffer Ozier Flow Studio. It'll be. It'll be. It'll be bigger. It'll be better. So stay tuned for that. Code Brew is hilarious. An hour outside Atlanta could be three miles. All right, guys, thanks so very much. I've been Jerry from Simply Cyber. I still am Jerry from Simply Cyber. This has been Cyber career hotline. I hope you got your questions answered. High fives for everybody. Thanks for hanging out. I appreciate you. Foreign. We'll see you tomorrow at 8am Eastern Time. If you. Oh, by the way, I've been doing this. I still haven't got enough information on this. I've been doing this every Sunday in in 2026. Still not sure if it's working or not. But we did release a produced video on on Simply Cyber. We do it Sundays at 4pm this video is from a FBI spy recruiter. This dude is, like, super unbelievable, legit. And he basically goes through how how he recruits people and how he socially engineers the crap out of people and how you can avoid it. So the episode is called Trust no one. Go watch it if you if you missed it. It's a good one. All right. For real, though, I'm out. I'm Jerry, your chat. Until next time.