In today’s digital age, completing online courses, earning certificates, or watching tutorials is often considered the standard route to becoming a cybersecurity professional. While these learning methods provide foundational knowledge, they often keep you confined within a limited scope , only what is taught. This can discourage deeper exploration and stifle your potential to think creatively or discover new possibilities in the field.
Instead of focusing solely on certificates, we should shift our attention to developing real skills, the kind that can make an actual impact in the cybersecurity community. Real skills go beyond theory and into practical, hands-on experience, such as:
1. Building useful tools or projects that help the community (not just another port scanner or basic monitoring tool).
2. Developing a web or software application from scratch to understand its inner workings.
3. Analyzing how various functions behave, what vulnerabilities they introduce, and how they can be exploited or secured.
This approach pushes you to understand both the offensive (red team) and defensive (blue team) mindsets. Regardless of which path you choose, it’s crucial to think and act like a professional, someone who understands systems deeply and can respond effectively to real-world scenarios.
Most online tutorials and courses are designed for beginners, perfect for those who are just starting out and need to understand the basics (like exploiting Metasploitable). However, these courses often:
1. Show only a few exploitation techniques without explaining the conditions under which they work.
2. Skip crucial details like antivirus detection, real-world limitations, or in-depth analysis.
3. Focus more on “how to use” rather than “how it works.”
Even top-tier institutions offering advanced courses can’t cover everything. Their content is limited by time and structure. True mastery comes from exploring beyond what’s taught, doing your own research, experimenting, and learning from real experiences.
To truly understand hacking, you need to understand how programs work. Learning programming is not optional, it’s essential. Ignore those who claim you don’t need programming to be a hacker. Those individuals likely rely heavily on automated vulnerability scanners and simply submit generated reports, calling themselves hackers.
Here’s what I recommend:
1. Assembly Language: Learn it to understand system-level actions, especially useful in reverse engineering and exploit development.
2. C/C++: Widely used in real-world applications. Don’t just stop at the basics, study the libraries and functions used in actual tools and software.
3. Python: Ideal for scripting and automation. Mastering it will save time and effort when building your own tools or automating repetitive tasks.
This post isn’t meant to discourage you from taking courses. They are a great starting point. The goal is to create awareness that the knowledge taught in a course is only the beginning. There’s a vast world of concepts, techniques, and real-world nuances waiting to be explored.
Don’t limit yourself. Push boundaries. Think critically. Build things. Break things (ethically). And most importantly, never stop learning.
Thanks for reading! If you agree with this content, please consider liking the post and sharing it with others who are starting their journey in cybersecurity.