Cybersecurity is a vast field. It encompasses many domains, such as Incident Response, SOC, Blue Team, Vulnerability Assessment, Penetration Testing, Red Teaming, Threat Hunting, Malware Analysis, and so on.

Here are some common Mistakes almost every beginner makes at their initial learning phases.

1. Unclear basics

Entering into the cybersecurity career without clearing the basics is like “Entering into World War III with an Iron Sword”.

You must complete the basics before starting cybersecurity if you want to grow fast and stick with this career. Because most beginners do not even understand how packets travel over the network & they are trying to learn by bypassing WAFs.

So, as a beginner, you must complete all of the basics, which will help you to understand how cybersecurity works at a core level & help improve your skills fast.

The minimum basics you must complete:

• Networking concepts (IP Addresses, Ports, Services, Packets, DNS, Internet, etc.)
• Operating Systems (Windows, Linux, fundamentals of OS, processes & threads, memory management, Administration)
• Basic Programming (Python, JavaScript, PHP, SQL)
• Security Controls & Protocols (Firewalls, IDS, IPS, HTTPS, FTP, SSH)

2. Focusing more on tools instead of the concept

I have witnessed almost every beginner focusing more on tools instead of the concept. Remember, tools are just programs used to automate workflow, helps us to reduce our workload & speed up the process.

But beginners think that using those tools, they can hack everything. This usually happens because they are motivated by watching hacking movies & scenes where hackers hack everything within just minutes.

The reality is quite the opposite here. You have to sit for hours to just understand what is going on.

No tool will help you hack everything; even tools make mistakes.

Remember, if you give a pen to a poet, he will write poetry. But if you give a pen to a security agent, he may use it as a weapon. The moral of the story is,

“It’s not the tool, It’s how you use it”

To use the tool efficiently, you must focus on learning concepts first.

3. Focusing only on theories & tutorials

After starting the journey in cybersecurity, beginners usually don’t have prior knowledge related to hacking or breaking security logics. So, they watch theories and tutorials.

Which is perfectly fine. But most of them only watch the theories & tutorials, and think they have learnt everything.

Remember, you haven’t learned anything until you put your hands on it.

Watching tutorials only helps in understanding methodologies & working progress. But you will never really understand until you practice it by yourself.

This is the reason why most of the beginners learn the concept in theory and watch tutorials, but when it’s time to do it in practice, they just get stunned with emptiness.

4. Focusing only on practicals without theory

As previously discussed, here are some beginners only focusing on practicals without completely learning theory.

If you don’t understand the theory, your practical performance will drastically reduce.

Understand it like this:

“You know how to fight with the sword, you have mastered it, but you didn’t learn strategies. This will be the reason for you to lose later”.

Both Practicals & Theories are equally important. I recommend that you start with understanding the theory first, then practically implement it.

5. Try to learn everything

As I described at the start of the blog, Cybersecurity is a very vast domain. Most beginners try to learn everything at their initial stages.

This is the most common mistake, even I have made it. So I can better understand why it is not a good approach & how to deal with it.

You are not a machine, you are a human. Humans have limits, Humans get tired, humans get overwhelmed, and humans get frustrated. You can’t just learn everything you want at the beginning stage.

This is one of the reasons why most beginners get overwhelmed. But I figured out a simple & effective solution for it.

First, take one path or domain you want to learn first, and prioritise them. Then start learning, complete their basics to intermediate. Then later you can switch to learn different domains’ things, this way you won’t get overwhelmed and help learn other domains of cybersecurity.

6. Not staying consistent

Apart from the discussed mistakes above, this mistake is the reason why most people start cybersecurity with high motivation, but can’t keep that motivation & consistency, which will become the reason for not getting growth & improvement in cybersecurity skills.

If you don’t stay consistent, you will start to forget things, which is very common. If you regularly learn, practice and clear self-doubts, this will help you to be in a flow.

Taking short breaks like 2–3 days is considerable, but that doesn’t mean that you take 2–3 days off every week.

7. Not staying up-to-date

Every day, something new happens in cyberspace. Staying up-to-date with the cyber trends, information security & cyber news helps you understand what is going on in the digital world.

Beginners usually do not focus on daily news related to cybersecurity & new technologies. But if you want to make a career in cybersecurity, this is the first thing you should start right now.

Conclusion

The conclusion here is that, as beginners, we all make mistakes, and there is nothing bad until we are learning something new from it.

But if we understand what mistakes we are making, and solve them, this can help us improve our cybersecurity skills fast & growing in our cybersecurity career.

Please share this blog with your friends & beginners in your network to help them out. Also, hit the clap if you found this interesting.

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Tell me, as a beginner, what mistakes you have made?

See you in the next blog, till then keep learning, keep growing!