There's no easy answer here. But what I can tell you is we need more qualified people doing cybersecurity jobs. I've got some numbers here that I want to talk about. Ninety two percent of the data breaches that we know about are caused by human error. What this tells us is it doesn't matter. You can have spend the most money on equipment, you can spend the most money on software, the most money on hardware but if you don't have competent cybersecurity professionals behind that equipment, you're absolutely not going to have success in securing your data. That's part of why I've put this course together. Now I'm recording this with the very best professionals in the world that do recording. But there's also been times where I've been on the sets doing recordings where the people that I did the recording with had bigger fancier equipment, really expensive equipment. They would even boast to me that they spent $20 million on all their equipment. But the skill set behind those cameras was not as good and that showed in the end product. So what I'm saying to you is, if you come to this right now and you take the things that we're doing in this course and really build your skill set around that and not go on to deep end and just starts dog peddling to try to swim, you will find that you have a long-lasting successful career because you will have built your skill set on a foundation that's not related to tricks, not related to specific equipment or tools. You will have a foundation that you can take and build success with any tool. Now, some other scary statistics and I'm going to tell you why this one's the most scary. Two hundred and seven days is the average time it took in 2020 for organizations to discover that they were breached. Now keep in mind, I have a pretty in-depth incident response course on the Infosec Skills platform specifically to take people that don't know incident response and give them foundational hands-on skills they can use right away. Let me tell you what's most troubling about this 207 days. In 2018, that number was about 170 days as the amount of time it took organizations to know if they're breached. In 2018, that number was about 196 days. Now, 2019 and up in 2020, it's 207 days. What I'm telling you is the number is going up and that is not a number that we need to see going up. With all the money that we're spending on equipment, with all the new technologies coming out, machine-learning this, AI that, deep learning this. We're going to solve all of our security problems with AI and machine learning. Why is the number going up? Why is it taking organizations longer to find out that they're breached? I think a key point to that is because the people that are behind those tools and behind that AI, are training that AI, training those algorithms with skill sets that aren't up to par. Because you can use AI, machine learning, deep learning, whatever you want. I always say garbage in, garbage out. The third number that I want to deal with is the number of files the average employee has access to, and this is staggering. This is a staggering number. The average employee in the US has access to 11 million files. Eleven million. Now, I could tell you, I know people in my orbit, my personal orbit, that I wouldn't want them have an access to 10 to 11 files because their cyber hygiene and their security hygiene is so terribly bad, and these are good friends of mine, and they know what I do for a living and I'm always coaching them and tell them not to do things, but they're like post your child for how to get phished or how to be victims of the Nigerian scam emails. Half my family has made the Nigerian princess rich from some of the things that they do all the time. But the average employee has access to 11 million files. Think about that, let that number sink in. So if I can compromise one of your employees, let's say your company or you worked for a company that has 1,000 employees. I consider myself to be a decent hacker. I don't think I'm an elite hacker, I don't think I'm the top in the world, but I think I'm pretty decent. Do you think that chances of me being able to exploit or successfully phish at least one of your 1,000 employees, what do you think that number is? What do you think my chances are? Because I see employees getting phished by terrible, very bad phishing attacks. So what that tells you is it's very likely that some of your employees are just going to get compromised no matter what. You all that are taking this course, you can put yourself in a position to be a buffer to try to stop that. Because the battle of trying to pit the employees against the threat actors, this is a battle that's going to be around for a long time. This is why we need products like security IQ and other things that will allow us to constantly improve the knowledge level of the average end user employee. But this course is not for the average end user, it's for you-all that are trying to come into this field to come on the front line with this and help fight this problem. Because 11 million files per employee is a staggering amount and it gives us an almost impossible odd as far as protecting it. But now we have some tools and we have some ways to approach that, and hopefully you coming into this, you're excited about joining this fight because I can tell you it's the most rewarding career that I can think of and I've done a lot of different things. As far as success and money, it's definitely there if you want to do it. But these are some of the fundamentals that we're going to dig into as we go throughout the course. Now, as is the case for this course, if you want more content from me, you can go to this website right here and you will see all of my training content listed out for you. Feel free to subscribe and comment on it. Thank you for joining this course. Go ahead and go to the next one immediately because you're going to jump right into some of the operating system fundamentals stuff. Thank you again, hope you enjoyed it.
