Dear Diary, I've Been Hacked - What is Cybersecurity and Why is it Important?

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Experts from Cybersecurity Ventures have found that in 2025, global damage from cybercrime will amount to $10.5 trillion — a figure with 12 zeros, by the way. The amount is not just large — it is equivalent to the GDP of Japan, Germany, and India combined. By 2031, every smartphone or computer will be attacked by malware every two seconds. The statistics look frightening — this is the reality of the modern world that we need to come to terms with. A cybersecurity specialist is a person who protects the money, data, and reputation of a company, as well as its employees and clients. Reverse engineers, penetration testers, and bug hunters confront a whole range of threats: from banal extortion to outright theft. Their work, as a rule, remains hidden from prying eyes, if you take out TV series like Cyberstalker (such films have nothing to do with the real tasks of forensic specialists).

Information security - what kind of beast is it?

A good definition of cybersecurity was given by the employees of Kaspersky Lab. In their opinion, information security is a set of methods and practices for protecting computers, servers, mobile devices, electronic systems, networks and data from attacks and intruders.
"All companies that produce products and make a profit will have people who want to harm them: steal something or disrupt processes. Modern enterprises use various IT solutions, from personal social media marketing service computers to servers, which are often subject to attacks. Their security must be ensured - making the work of intruders more difficult and ensuring that fraudsters do not get into the infrastructure," - Nikita Belugin, a cybersecurity course instructor at TMS.
The list of tasks of an information security specialist varies depending on the direction. Some experts identify threats, others analyze them, and others react. A student who has completed a course at the TeachMeSkills IT school will most likely end up in either a CERT (emergency response team) or a SOC (cybersecurity center). At the start, the essence of his work will be to monitor the screen, which will display attack vectors in real time.

A new employee will not react to threats on his own - turn off machines, disconnect servers and extinguish ports. His tasks are limited to collecting and processing information, with subsequent transfer to experienced colleagues. However, there is another option - the most prepared students of the IT school, who have managed to master additional theoretical and practical skills, get positions as analysts or DevOps engineers.

What does a cybersecurity specialist do?

The number of cyberattacks increases every year: in 30% of cases, fraudsters are hunting for financial gain, in 60% - they are trying to get valuable data, in 8% - they are engaged in hacktivism , in 2% - they are waging a real cyberwar.



reverse engineers - study the code, identify weaknesses and provide recommendations for strengthening protection;
forensics specialists - investigate cybercrimes, reconstruct the chronology of events and expose hacker groups;
antifraud - monitor security during online transactions, track suspicious financial transactions;
Penetrators - become ethical hackers, hacking systems with the permission of the owners to find vulnerabilities;
Bug hunters - identify and quickly fix software and hardware failures.
"When a person joins a company, he becomes an engineer of the center or department of cybersecurity — because TC does not have a structure with antifraud, pentesters or bug hunters. This division system exists in the format of local slang. Today, reverse engineers and forensics specialists are in demand in the country — to them I would add specialists who respond to threats post factum, and experts who predict attacks," — Nikita Belugin, a cybersecurity course instructor at TMS.

What is needed to enter the profession — hard and soft skills

In the cybersecurity courses at the TeachMeSkills IT school, teachers consciously prepare specialists with a wide range of skills. In this area, there are often situations when a person comes to get a job, for example, as a reverse engineer, but the company wants to retrain him — turn him into a DevOps, getting a valuable and necessary expert.

According to our mentors, the hard skills of a beginner employee of the information security department include:

knowledge of networks - what networks are, how they work, what hardware they consist of, what protocols they interact with;
understanding the operating principles of firewalls - elements of computer networks that control and filter traffic;
skills in handling operating systems - primarily Windows, since it is the most popular and most often subject to attacks;
understanding the types and kinds of threats - what threats are, what types there are, how viruses work, how to protect yourself from different attacks;
knowledge of a programming language - Python or C# , for writing scripts to automate processes, collect data and display information;
ability to work with basic console commands - both in the Windows operating system and on Linux.

It takes 5.5 months to master the basics necessary for employment. Companies working in the field of information security are actively hunting for employees. It is not easy to judge the demand for specialists in the Belarusian market - about 20 vacancies with a salary of 600 to 900 dollars are published on the rabota.by portal. On the European Glassdoor, there are about 12,100 such offers - the average salary is 54-174 thousand dollars per year.