CyberWire Daily - Billy Wilson: Translating language skills to technical skills. [HPC] [Career Notes]

Episode Date: October 13, 2024

Enjoy this special encore episode, where we are joined by a High Performance Computing Systems Administrator at Brigham Young University. Billy Wilson tells his cybersecurity career story translating language skills to technical skills. According to Billy's employer, moving to a technical position at his alma mater occurred because Billy showed this potential and a thirst for learning. He is currently pursuing his master's degree from SANS Technology Institute for Information Security Engineering while working to secure BYU's data for their computationally-intensive research. Billy notes that not everyone has one overarching passion which gives him variety in his work. And, we thank Billy for sharing his story with us. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're listening to the Cyber Wire Network, powered by N2K. of you, I was concerned about my data being sold by data brokers. So I decided to try Delete.me. I have to say, Delete.me is a game changer. Within days of signing up, they started removing my personal information from hundreds of data brokers. I finally have peace of mind knowing my data privacy is protected. Delete.me's team does all the work for you with detailed reports so you know exactly what's been done. Take control of your data and keep your private life Thank you. JoinDeleteMe.com slash N2K and use promo code N2K at checkout. The only way to get 20% off is to go to JoinDeleteMe.com slash N2K and enter code N2K at checkout. That's JoinDeleteMe.com slash N2K, code N2K. My name is Billy Wilson.

I'm a high-performance computing systems administrator at Brigham Young University. Some of my earliest notions were actually writing. I was really interested in being a writer. And that still persists to this day, my earliest notions were actually writing. I was really interested in being a writer. And that still persists to this day, that when I have opportunities in time, I like to write. It kind of resonates with me. When I was 19 years old, I went on an ecclesiastical mission from my church out to South Korea and spent a couple of years in that country, you know, learning a new language. And then after that, I came to BYU as a student and I studied linguistics and Korean, continuing that interest.

Learning languages, being able to communicate, that's a huge part of tech because those language skills translate to technical skills when you're sitting at a command prompt or writing scripts, so on and so forth, or trying to interpret data. So I graduated, and it was in the middle of the recession. It was in 2010. And about that time, I had a friend saying, hey, we have a company out here. Security Metrics was a mid-sized company I worked for. And they needed someone that spoke Korean to talk with their Korean clients in New York and LA. So I joined up. And after a few months there, I found myself translating the PCI DSS 2.0 that had just come out. And it was a lot of work. And partway through that, I started thinking

to myself, do I want to be translating documents in a room for the rest of my life? Kind of a moment of self-reflection, deciding if this is my career or not. And I started browsing the different departments at Security Metrics and looked at one and it said penetration testing. And I said, what is that? And I started looking into it and, you know, you start having these visions of the old sneakers movie or, you know, I think Robert Redford back in the day or these kind of romanticized ideas of hacking. So that was kind of running through my head at the time. But I had a moment where I said, I want to do that and I'm going to do that. And eventually I tried to move to high

performance computing at my alma mater. This is kind of funny, but my boss, he said, you know, we're really glad we hired you. The reason we hired you is because, you know, you showed this potential and you had a thirst for learning. But also it was because we couldn't completely afford the people that were fully qualified for the job. I said, perfect. I'm glad that you couldn't afford the fully qualified people because I'm so ready to learn this. So that was an opportunity for me. opportunity for me. And that slowly evolved into an interest in really protecting kind of the defense side and grew into what I'm working on now, which is a master's degree from SANS

Technology Institute for information security engineering, because we do deal with protected data depending on research contracts that professors pull in, and then we're responsible for just securing that data that they're dealing with. We have a big cluster of Linux servers where our researchers can dispatch jobs to do their research. And we get to be this sort of knot, kind of this tied knot in the university

where a lot of the computationally intensive research gets centralized because it's easier to centralize that than to have it all distributed across, you know, the different departments or individual professors who care about the research, but they don't necessarily want to get bogged down by the details of security or compliance. If I went back and got to talk to myself, I'd probably tell myself to not panic. I was convinced that I needed to have a single overarching passion above everything else in my career, or else I don't have my career set yet, was sort of my concern.

And I was also worried because I would see these professionals and these trainers talking about their passion, right? And I was wondering what was wrong with me, why I didn't have the same thing. And I discovered that my personality is just a little bit different I don't necessarily have one single overarching passion because because there's so many interesting things in the world and I shouldn't panic about that if there's something enjoyable about it and fun I can get started on it sometimes the solution isn't just to to have fun all the time but it's to get satisfaction from the work itself. Because no matter how good a job is, there's always going to be work and things you might not want to do that particular day that when you finally just dig down and get it done, you still feel satisfied. Thank you.