Do you need a degree to succeed?

Moved Blog
  • Here’s a subject that’s close to my heart. I saw a thread on Twitter recently that essentially dismissed those who attended public school as not being worthy of entry into Oxbridge and were effectively “tarnishing the brand” - I kid you not. Here’s the screenshot which piqued my interest, quickly followed by disbelief.

    20220507_145406.jpg

    And here’s my response to this

    Snobbery at its best (or worst, if you prefer). I attended a comprehensive school, didn’t go to college or university, don’t have a degree - but here I am - Director of Information Technology and CISO for a financial organisation. Oh, and I’m also free of the debt mantle…

    My point? I attended a comprehensive, didn’t go to college (straight into employment) and didn’t have the funds or other financial means to attend university and get a degree. However, as a shining example of what effort and experience can achieve, I’m a Director of Information Technology, and Chief Information Security Officer for a financial firm in London.

    Does that mean I, along with others who attended state school rather than private, and didn’t go to university aren’t fit for purpose? Do you really need a degree to succeed in life?

    I have my thoughts on this but would love to hear others. I know @marusaky will have a view on this 🤔

  • @phenomlab not going to take her stupid comment seriously 🙂
    that would make her idea worth the time.

    some people are living on another planet but writing in our world. 🤣

  • @sinanisler so very well put. I’m not taking any notice of this because I’m living proof that it’s bullsh*t !

  • FWIW, I agree. I have children and I don’t think universities have a strong value prop, I don’t think I’ll advise them to go to one when the time comes. We need to get this point across: the promise that universities make (come here, invest 5 years of your time, get a job for life) is long gone. That’s unsutstainable. It’s an implicit promise. And people get itchy if they cannot put a degree on their linkedin. But the success of coding bootcamps show that there’s a shorter path.

  • @qwinter very well put. Great points and I can certainly align with these. I personally don’t see no university as a barrier to progression. My old boss said that he’d take preference with anyone who had a degree because of their “ability to think logically” (I kid you not). I said “well, you hired me and I don’t have a degree…”.

    He paused for a moment realising that he’d literally dug himself a hole and fell in it. He then said “ah yes, but you’re an exception”.

    “Exception” or not - it’s still a bigoted reasoning mechanism, and elitist to put it mildly. Class distinction springs to mind here.


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    Just seen this post pop up on Sky News

    https://news.sky.com/story/elon-musks-brain-chip-firm-given-all-clear-to-recruit-for-human-trials-12965469

    He has claimed the devices are so safe he would happily use his children as test subjects.

    Is this guy completely insane? You’d seriously use your kids as Guinea Pigs in human trials?? This guy clearly has easily more money than sense, and anyone who’d put their children in danger in the name of technology “advances” should seriously question their own ethics - and I’m honestly shocked that nobody else seems to have a comment about this.

    This entire “experiment” is dangerous to say the least in my view as there is huge potential for error. However, reading the below article where a paralyzed man was able to walk again thanks to a neuro “bridge” is truly ground breaking and life changing for that individual.

    https://news.sky.com/story/paralysed-man-walks-again-thanks-to-digital-bridge-that-wirelessly-reconnects-brain-and-spinal-cord-12888128

    However, this is reputable Swiss technology at it’s finest - Switzerland’s Lausanne University Hospital, the University of Lausanne, and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne were all involved in this process and the implants themselves were developed by the French Atomic Energy Commission.

    Musk’s “off the cuff” remark makes the entire process sound “cavalier” in my view and the brain isn’t something that can be manipulated without dire consequences for the patient if you get it wrong.

    I daresay there are going to agreements composed by lawyers which each recipient of this technology will need to sign so that it exonerates Neuralink and it’s executives of all responsibility should anything go wrong.

    I must admit, I’m torn here (in the sense of the Swiss experiment) - part of me finds it morally wrong to interfere with the human brain like this because of the potential for irreversible damage, although the benefits are huge, obviously life changing for the recipient, and in most cases may outweigh the risk (at what level I cannot comment not being a neurosurgeon of course).

    Interested in other views - would you offer yourself as a test subject for this? If I were in a wheelchair and couldn’t move, I probably would I think, but would need assurance that such technology and it’s associated procedure is safe, which at this stage, I’m not convinced it’s a guarantee that can be given. There are of course no real guarantees with anything these days, but this is a leap of faith that once taken, cannot be reversed if it goes wrong.

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    @Panda said in Wasting time on a system that hangs on boot:

    Why do you prefer to use KDE Linux distro, over say Ubuntu?

    A matter of taste really. I’ve tried pretty much every Linux distro out there over the years, and whilst I started with Ubuntu, I used Linux mint for a long time also. All of them are Debian backed anyway 😁

    I guess I feel in love with KDE (Neon) because of the amount of effort they’d gone to in relation to the UI.

    I agree about the lead and the OS statement which is why I suspect that Windows simply ignored it (although the Device also worked fine there, so it clearly wasn’t that faulty)

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    @DownPW If you don’t mind a retro display type of Dot Matrix - why on earth would anyone want that? I get the concept, but it’s nothing more than a gimmick and adds zero value to the operation of the handset.

    Sustainable product… with a £600 plus price tag…

    “Nothing Phone”? More like “Nothing Special” 😄

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    @downpw I’m inclined to agree with the self-development - and the point you make about the lack of certification being seen as a barrier to enter professions.

    @downpw said in Experience vs Certification - who wins?:

    Because even without experience, if you have an iron will, you can be better than someone who has certification. With more work and effort, certainly, but does it matter?

    This is an interesting statement because I knew of several people years ago whom obtained MCSE accreditation, but had never sat in front of a real-life scenario before where they had to fix something - hence, the term, “Paper MCSE”. Essentially, this involves reading a book, then going to do the exam. Some people have that capability where they can retain a bulk load of information, and use that to easily pass an exam - yet have no practical experience.

    To me, it’s easy to identify these people. They can give you a text-book answer, but have no ability to prove it physically.

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    1631810017053-netsecurity.jpg.webp
    I read an article By Glenn S. Gerstell (Mr. Gerstell is the general counsel of the National Security Agency) with a great deal of interest. That same article is detailed below

    The National Security Operations Center occupies a large windowless room, bathed in blue light, on the third floor of the National Security Agency’s headquarters outside of Washington. For the past 46 years, around the clock without a single interruption, a team of senior military and intelligence officials has staffed this national security nerve center.

    The center’s senior operations officer is surrounded by glowing high-definition monitors showing information about things like Pentagon computer networks, military and civilian air traffic in the Middle East and video feeds from drones in Afghanistan. The officer is authorized to notify the president any time of the day or night of a critical threat.

    Just down a staircase outside the operations center is the Defense Special Missile and Aeronautics Center, which keeps track of missile and satellite launches by China, North Korea, Russia, Iran and other countries. If North Korea was ever to launch an intercontinental ballistic missile toward Los Angeles, those keeping watch might have half an hour or more between the time of detection to the time the missile would land at the target. At least in theory, that is enough time to alert the operations center two floors above and alert the military to shoot down the missile.

    But these early-warning centers have no ability to issue a warning to the president that would stop a cyberattack that takes down a regional or national power grid or to intercept a hypersonic cruise missile launched from Russia or China. The cyberattack can be detected only upon occurrence, and the hypersonic missile, only seconds or at best minutes before attack. And even if we could detect a missile flying at low altitudes at 20 times the speed of sound, we have no way of stopping it.

    Something I’ve been saying all along is that technology alone cannot stop cyber attacks. Often referred to as a “silver bullet”, or “blinky lights”, this provides the misconception that by purchasing that new, shiny device, you’re completely secure. Sorry folks, but this just isn’t true. In fact, cyber crime, and it’s associated plethora of hourly attacks is evolving at an alarming rate - in fact, much faster than you’d like to believe.

    You’d think that for all the huge technological advances we have made in this world, the almost daily plethora of corporate security breaches, high profile data loss, and individuals being scammed every day would have dropped down to nothing more than a trickle - even to the point where they became virtually non-existent. We are making huge progress with landings on Mars, autonomous space vehicles, artificial intelligence, big data, machine learning, and essentially reaching new heights on a daily basis thanks to some of the most creative minds in this technological sphere. But somehow, we have lost our way, stumbled and fallen - mostly on our own sword. But why ?

    Just like the Y2k Gold Rush in the late 90’s, information security has become the next big thing with companies ranging from a few employees as startups to enterprise organisations touting their services and platforms to be the best in class, and the next “must have” tool in the blue team’s already bulging arsenal of tools. Tools that on their own in fact have little effect unless they are combined with something else as equally as expensive to run. We’ve spent so much time focusing on efforts ranging from what SEIM solution we need to what will be labelled as the ultimate silver bullet capable of eliminating the threat of attack once and for all that in my opinion, we have lost sight of the original goal. With regulatory requirements and best practice pushing us towards products and services that either require additional staff to manage, or are incredibly expensive to deploy and ultimately run. Supposedly, in an effort to simplify the management, analysis, and processing of millions of logs per hour we’ve created even more platforms to ingest this data in order to make sense of it.

    In reality, all we have created is a shark infested pool where larger companies consume up and coming tech startups for breakfast to ensure that they do not pose a threat to their business model / gravy train, therefore enabling them to dominate the space even further with their newly enhanced reach.

    How did we get to this ? What happened to thought process and working together in order to combat the threat that increases on an hourly basis ? We seem to be so focused on making sure that we aren’t the next organisation to be breached that we have lost the art of communication and the full benefit of sharing information so that it assists others in their journey. We’ve become so obsessed with the daily onslaught of platforms that we no longer seem to have the time to even think, let alone take stock and regroup - not as an individual, but as a community.

    There are a number of ”communities” that offer “free” forums and products under the open source banner, but sadly, these seem to be turning into paid-for products at a rate of knots. I understand people need to live and make money, but if awareness was raised to the point where users wouldn’t click links in phishing emails, fall for the fake emergency wire transfer request from the CEO, or be suddenly tempted by the latest offer in terms of cheap technology then we might - just might - be able to make the world a better place. In order to make this work, we first need to remove the stigma that has become so ingrained by the media and set in stone like King Arthur’s Excalibur. Let’s first start with the hacker / criminal parallel. They aren’t the same thing folks.

    Nope. Not at all. Hackers are those people who find ingenious ways of getting into networks and infrastructure that you never even knew existed, trick you into parting with sensitive information (then inform you as to where you went wrong), and most importantly, educate you so that you and your network are far more secure against real attacks and real criminals. These people exist to increase your awareness, and by definition, security footprint - not use it against you in order to steal. Hackers do like to wear hoodies as they are comfortable, but you won’t find one using gloves, wearing a balaclava or sunglasses, and in some cases, they actually prefer desktops rather than laptops.

    The image being portrayed here is one perpetuated by the media, and it has certainly been effective - but not in a positive way. The word “hacker” is now synonymous with criminals, where it really shouldn’t be. One defines security, whereas the other sets out to break it. If we locked up all the hackers on this planet, we’d only have the blue team remaining. It’s the job of the red team (hackers) to see how strong your defences are. Hackers exist to educate, not infiltrate (at least, not without asking for permission first :))

    I personally have lost count of how many times I’ve sat in meetings where a sales pitch around a security platform is touted as a one stop shop or a Swiss army knife that can protect your entire network from a breach. Admittedly, there’s some great technology on the market that performs a variety of functions to protect your estate, but they all fail to take into consideration the weakest link in any chain - users. Irrespective of bleeding edge “combat platforms” (as I like to refer to them), criminals are becoming very adept in their approach, leveraging techniques such as social engineering. It should come as no surprise for you to learn that this type of attack can literally walk past your shiny new defence system as it relies on the one vulnerability you cannot predict - the human. Hence the term “hacking humans”.

    I’m of the firm opinion that if you want to outsmart a criminal, you have to think like one. Whilst newfangled platforms are created to assist in the fight against cyber crime, they are complex to configure, suffer from alerting bloat (far too many emails so you end up missing the one where your network is actually being compromised), or are simply overwhelming and difficult to understand. Here’s the thing. You don’t need (although they do help) expensive bleeding edge platforms with flashing lights to tell you where weak points lie within your network, but you do need to understand how a criminal can and will exploit these. A vulnerability cannot be leveraged if it no longer exists, or even better, never even existed to begin with.

    And so, on with the mission, and the real reason as to why I created this site. I’ve been working in information technology for 30 years, and have a very strong technical background in network design and information security.

    What I want to do is create a communication, information, and awareness sharing platform. I created the original concept of what I thought this new community should look like in my head, but its taken a while to finally develop, get people interested, and on board. To my mind, those from inside and outside of the information security arena will pool together, share knowledge, raise awareness, and probably the most important, harness this new found force and drive change forward.

    The breaches we are witnessing on a daily basis are not going to simply stop. They will increase dramatically in their frequency, and will get worse with each incident.

    Let’s stop the “hackers are criminals” myth, start using our own unique talents in this field, and make a community that

    is able to bring effective change treats everyone as equals The community once fully established could easily be the catalyst for change - both in perception, and inception.

    Why not wield the stick for a change instead of being beaten with it, and work as a global virtual team instead ?

    Will you join me ? In case I haven’t already mentioned it, this initiative has no cost - only gains. It is entirely free.

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