It's rare to go a day without hearing about a catastrophic ransomware attack or sensitive data breach that affects both individuals and businesses across industries. Cyberattacks are becoming more sophisticated and can target anything from credit card information to personal health records.

The role of cybersecurity professionals is to protect against such attacks by looking for weaknesses and taking preventative measures. To do this successfully, they need certain skills, both technical and non-technical.

To keep up with the latest hacking techniques and methods, it's essential for cybersecurity specialists to be conversant with the various computer systems and platforms. This includes forensic investigation programming languages, as well as specific tools (e.g. the ones employed for digital forensics and penetration testing). For example cybersecurity analysts need to understand how IoT devices connect to the Internet and how they can be hackable.

It is essential that cybersecurity professionals are able to recognize and assess the risk in their organizations. It's difficult to defend yourself from every threat, as hackers have an almost limitless variety of ways to cause problems. For example security professionals must know that passwords should be long, complicated, and include an assortment of upper and lowercase numbers, letters as well as symbols. Also, that passwords should not contain personal information such as birthdays or the family member's name.

To become a successful cyber expert you must feel empathy for the victims and perpetrators of cyberattacks. This allows them to see the way hackers think. They can then put together more effective defences.