Lesley Carhart Jun 16, 2024

Two controversial pieces of cybersecurity career advice I give to a lot of people I talk to on mentorship calls:

1) Don't become a manager unless you genuinely want to be a servant leader and devote yourself to people and program management for the joy and fulfillment of it.

2) Don't become a red teamer unless you genuinely in your heart of hearts want to be a red teamer, you understand what the role entails (even the boring parts), and you are willing to very deeply commit extra time and effort. They're generally much more competitive roles.

Show threadRandom Damage 🌻

@hacks4pancakes the writing.

ALL the writing.

Red Teamers who are good at writing are a blessing to their organizations

Jun 16, 2024 at 6:11pmWeb
Show threadegyp7Jun 16, 2024
@RandomDamage @hacks4pancakes writing skills are at least, if not more important than hacking skills.
Show threadGraham Sutherland / PolynomialJun 16, 2024
@egypt @RandomDamage @hacks4pancakes communication is more important than technical chops imo. the part of the job people rarely talk about when folks are looking to get into pentesting or red teaming is that you have to really understand the client's wants and needs, help form a threat model you can work from, and be able to guide them through the process of the test, the results of it, and remediation. and often you're navigating company politics or contractor relationships at the same time.
Show threadGraham Sutherland / PolynomialJun 16, 2024
@egypt @RandomDamage @hacks4pancakes folks think of reports as the big communication aspect of the job but most of the really critical stuff comes down to navigating conference calls with different parties who want different things and have different levels of technical knowledge. the communication goes way beyond written explanation of technical stuff. we're deep into customer relationship management territory.
Show threadGraham Sutherland / PolynomialJun 16, 2024

@RandomDamage @hacks4pancakes 100%. I don't care how hot shit you are at finding vulns in stuff, writing tools, and all the other technical stuff - if you can't communicate the details in writing then you can't do the job.

language barrier is fine - most places have peer review or editorial staff to help with that. but communication is like 80% of the job role, you need to commit to being good at it.

Show threadmindhackdiva  ã€ Jun 20, 2024
@gsuberland @RandomDamage @hacks4pancakes
This.