CyberWire Daily - Jack Rhysider: Get your experience points in everything. [Career Notes]

Episode Date: August 30, 2020

Host of Darknet Diaries podcast Jack Rhysider shares his experiences from studying computer engineering at university to his strategy of using gamification on his career that led to him landing in the security space. Jack talks about how his wide experiences came together in security and what prompted him to learn podcasting. Jack endeavors to share the whole story through his podcasts while making them entertaining, enlightening and inspirational. Our thanks to Jack for sharing his story with us.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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But she did. And so I was playing games, and I was actually coding in like basic at the time and, you know, doing stuff. And it wasn't until I think AOL came around and I got connected to the Internet and that just kind of was amazing. Like that, I think, is what made me say, OK, let me pursue a career in this. And I think my dad wanted me to be like a VCR repairman is what I think his hopes were. I wish I'm glad I didn't take him up on that. So we got enrolled in the university and I started going to classes to do some formal training.

I was kind of young and naive and I felt like, okay, once I have a bachelor's degree in computer engineering, companies will just be clamoring for me. They'll be knocking on my door 10 at a time, but I had a really tough time finding anything technical to do after I got my degree, which is so strange now that I look back at it, because the opportunities were endless, but I just didn't know where to look, and I was a little too, I don't know, on my high horse. I was playing a lot of video games right before this too. And I thought, let's make this a video game. Let me see if I can gain experience points and just focus on this. Like, okay, the current mission is to accomplish the certificate. What do I need to do to get this mission complete? Like I had it in a kind of a gamification kind of mentality to get these certs.

And thinking with a new fresh certificate and a degree, that should be able to land me a job. And it sure did. Right away, like pretty much the first place I called, they said, oh yeah, we'll take you right away. And that was a NOC, Network Operations Center, handling incidents for clients that their network would go down or there would be some sort of fault in the network. I would see that alert and then

engage the person who needed to be engaged. Once I got my CCMP, that knock was kind of like, okay, you're ready for the big league. So somebody found a place for me in the engineering team, and it was actually the security engineering team needed another engineer. And so they said, do you want to do it? And I said, yes. And I didn't really know exactly what security was at the time

because I wasn't into it that much. I just was a little bit comfortable. But when I got over there and I was troubleshooting all kinds of things, I was realizing how important it was to know a little bit about everything. Because in security, you get this one weird problem that you only remember from college days studying that one time, right? So it was such a great thing to have all of my wide experiences come together into a focus in security. And I think it was a perfect match for me. And so that's when I actually fell in love with security. That's when I started a blog called tunnelsup.com. And the blog was really when

I would have problems with a firewall or some device and I googled it and the answers weren't there in Google or they were so deep in the Cisco documentation that it was like, oh my gosh, it took me an hour just to find this one thing. And so I was really trying to break down these really complicated topics to, you know, in an easy to understand way. And I think that kind of paved the way for the podcast later. I wanted this show to exist. I wanted somebody to, there's stuff that happened like six years ago that we're just getting a little bit more, like, like the guy got sentenced from a crime that he did six years ago.

Somebody needs to go back and capture this entire story from, from the beginning all the way to the end. It might've taken six years for us to get the whole story. I couldn't, I didn't find anybody in the podcasting space doing that. Everyone was doing interviews or news in security. I'm always doing these long-form stories. And so I decided to read a book on how to podcast and started giving it a shot. And I was actually doing weekly episodes. I don't know how I was getting them out every week, but I was doing it with a full-time job to get things going.

One of the things that really resonated with me was a talk I watched from Leslie Carhart and Johnny Christmas. They said, if you want to be a rock star in security, don't try to publish an amazing paper that's a new kind of encryption or try to impress us, other people in the cybersecurity space. Instead, go do a talk at Comic-Con.

Go talk to the average person and tell them you're a hacker and they'll totally get blown away by the stories you have. Even if they're just basic run of the mill stories that we all have, because you're hitting a general audience and they don't understand what you do, but when you explain to them in a way that they can understand, they're going to, they're going to be blown away. And so that kind of really resonated with me. If I could hit the general audience with some of this stuff, what could that do to them? That would be entertaining. That would be enlightening.

That would be educational and maybe inspirational for them. And so that's always been something that I've wanted to do. So it's really hard to walk both lines there. Hey everybody, Dave here. Have you ever wondered where your personal information is lurking online? Like many of you, I was concerned about my data being sold by data brokers. So I decided to try DeleteMe. I have to say, DeleteMe is a game changer.

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