Building the Cyber Skills to Hold Bad Actors Accountable
TRANSCRIPT
Anthea Gonzalez (ITM, M.A.S. CYF 鈥22): I have known since I was really young that I wanted to catch bad guys. And then when I was about 15, I heard the term cybersecurity for the first time. And I just assumed, 鈥淥h that鈥檚 just catching bad guys online, that鈥檚 what I鈥檓 going to do.鈥
The internet is great at being anonymous. How do you hold someone accountable if it鈥檚 an anonymous website and there鈥檚 no way to trace someone back?
ITM is the information technology and management program here at Illinois Tech. Like IT, but also the management component, so what it takes to do while I鈥檓 managing IT.
I really enjoy a lot of the hands-on courses. One I particularly like, a Vulnerability and Analysis course. The final was essentially the professor gave us an IP and was like, 鈥淏reak into it.鈥
I found that it takes a lot of patience and a lot of research, a lot of reconnaissance. What kind of machine am I looking at? Am I looking for open parts? How can I exploit those? And it felt really rewarding when I was finally able to pop that shell. That鈥檚 a memory that I鈥檒l keep forever.
I鈥檝e been able to take both really technical classes, but also more of the policy鈥攍ooking into why we do the things that we do in IT, which I found myself really enjoying.
I accepted an offer with Cisco Systems as an information security engineer with the team I鈥檝e been interning for about three years now, so I鈥檓 really excited to go back to them.
No one is un-trackable, there鈥檚 never a true way to be secure. It鈥檚 just being able to accept risks, and so I would hope that one day I could help in a courtroom and present like, 鈥淥h this is why I think this happened,鈥 and do the best to my ability to make sure that someone who did something bad is held accountable for it.
