Written and Verbal Communication

            One of the skills I have honed and refined during my academic career is written and verbal communication. There has not been a single day where this has not come in handy in not only my academic life, but also my professional life. While some may say that this is not necessarily important in a tech focused field, I would beg to disagree. Cybersecurity is a human or social field. Not only do you need to be able to work in teams, but you also need to understand how people communicate and learn. Over 90% of cyber attacks occur due to some kind of human error (O’Driscoll, 2024). Having the ability to communicate with people is vital in this field and I believe I have many artifacts that can exemplify this fact.

            Throughout my academic career I have written a variety of different technical and opinion pieces on different topics related to cybersecurity. For example, one paper that stuck out to me in my cryptography for cybersecurity class revolves around a particularly popular topic in the tech field: cryptocurrency and the blockchain. In this paper I discussed how revolutionary blockchain technology and cryptocurrency is to our life today. One specific part of this paper related to cybersecurity that stuck out to me is how asymmetric cryptography and hashing plays into this process and how blockchain technology can apply to cybersecurity and the tech field in general in the future. Another artifact I believe proves my ability to communicate technical information would be my paper on the NotPetya attack. This paper covers the most devastating cyber attack in history, NotPetya (Greenberg, 2018). This attack was one of the largest cyber related events in the Russo-Ukrainian War. Russia attacked Ukraine’s power grid and I covered the collateral damage of the attack in addition to the technical elements involved in the attack. The third artifact in my collected that shines a light on my written communication skills would be my paper in the cyber law course. In this paper I covered the landscape of international law in the digital realm. One interesting thing I found in this paper is that there really are not a ton of laws made for the digital era. We are exploring a completely unexplored frontier. What are the rules for engagement? How do we find these bad agents in the digital ethos? Another major artifact I believe represents my verbal communication skills would be my professional experience as a sales associate the duck thru with the Jernigan oil company. At the duck thru I provide what some call first class customer service.           On the job communication is a vital skill because you are communicating with people all day. Someone may be having trouble with the rewards program, or someone may be having an issue finding something. I believe there has not been one single day where my communication skills have not come in handy at the duck thru,

Linux Systems

            In Linux systems for cybersecurity, I believe I acquired a good bit of academic artifacts. When it comes to this course, I picked up a lot of technical skills. In this course I learned a lot about the technical skills in the Linux operating system ranging from the command line, networking, communications, password cracking, and user and group management. In each of the artifacts it shows my work in hands on lab activities.

Cyber Risk Management

            In the cyber risk management course I learned a lot about what goes into the maintaining an organization’s cyber compliance in addition to creating a risk assessment approach and a business continuity plan.

Bibliography

Greenberg, A. (2018). The Untold Story of NotPetya, the Most Devastating Cyberattack in History. Retrieved from Wired: https://www.wired.com/story/notpetya-cyberattack-ukraine-russia-code-crashed-the-world/

O’Driscoll, A. (2024, January 8). The role of human error in cybersecuriy: what the stats tell us. Retrieved from comparitech: https://www.comparitech.com/blog/information-security/human-error-cybersecurity-stats/