Becoming Cyber returns on 20 August

A short note on where this newsletter has been, and what it is now about.

This newsletter has been quiet for a while. It starts again on Thursday 20 August.

Here is what changed. The first cybersecurity job—the bottom of the alert queue, where nearly everyone I respect in this field started—is being automated. Not gone. Being automated, right now, while people are still sitting in it. And the uncomfortable part is that a lot of it should be: it was repetitive work that burned people out. But that queue was also where you learned the job. Hand the toil to software and the apprenticeship goes with it.

That knot is what the next season is about. An issue every two weeks. No hype, no invented numbers, and no pretending the old map still works when it doesn’t.

The 2021 archive is still here, including two issues where I argued cybersecurity was a future-proof career and told you how to outrun automation. I am not taking those down. I will account for them properly in a few weeks.

If you subscribed years ago to break in, stay with me. It is a harder and more interesting problem now.

—Oritse

A note on where I stand: I’m a practicing security executive and an advisory-board member of a company building autonomous (“agentic”) security tools. I keep anything non-public—about my employer or that company—out of what I write here.