Guest Speaker Series: Jonathan Omansky, Symantec
By: Michael Korens
Tags: Cybersecurity, Cd Guestspeaker Series

Guest Speaker Series: Jonathan Omansky, Symantec

Jonathan talked about his Cybersecurity Journey & what matters.

Editor’s Note — This blog post was co-written by michael korens & Vincent Le

Times were tense as the fifth week of the Cyber Defenders program came to a close. All five teams were hard at work, doing their best work while trying to find their footing in an unfamiliar environment. From a glance, anyone could tell that a much needed mental break was long overdue.

That upcoming afternoon we learned that we had a speaker coming in. Jonathan Omansky, Director of Operations at Symantec, came and gave the program a very insightful talk. In his presentation, he went over various topics. For instance, he explained how he and other people got hooked into the security line of work, often straying from the traditional way of school and certifications.

What are some statistics that Jonathan provided to us?

According to Jonathan, in 2009 there were over 2 million pieces of unique malware was created. However, In 2017 over 730 million unique pieces of malware were created. That’s about 2 million pieces of malware a day which presents a big problem for his team: how do you go about patching 2 million unique pieces of malware per day? In order to manage a business all day, Symantec has 3 core operations around the world that shift every day at 5 o’clock.

Symantec’s attack investigation team is a dedicated team of world class cyber analysts that investigates the most sophisticated and most dangerous attacks. Their goal is to keep their customers safe and be one step ahead of the attackers. Here are a few things that the investigation team does:

Build a visualization that represents the full picture of security incidents/attack campaigns Proactively notify affected customers whenever an attack occurs on their network Work with law enforcement to track and disrupt cyber criminals. The best way to prevent a cyber attack is to arrest the people doing them. Frequent media interviews to inform everyone about widespread attacks and what you can do about them.

What are tools and skills used on a day to day basis for these teams?

File reverse engineering/whitebox analysis

Assembly, IDA, OilyDBG, and Regex tools

Network traffic/exploit analysis

RFC, Tcpdump, Wireshark, Ethereal, and Regex tools

Email security/spam

Knowledge of Mailers, Phishing, Newsletters, MalwareRuns, and Link Manipulation

Incident Response

Communication skills, Escalation Handling, and IR Handling skills

The Cybersecurity Job Market

As an interesting fact, there has never been a better time to enter the Cybersecurity job market. In January of this year, there were over one million Cybersecurity job openings world wide. In fact, demand is expected to rise to over 6 million job positions globally by 2019, with a projected shortfall of 1.5 million.

In addition, Cyber Security salaries are higher than many other tech roles. There is incredible room for rapid career growth in this industry and plenty of programs such as SC3, are available to get started in the Cybersecurity industry.

What are the top qualities and skills that Jonathan looks for in an individual?

Display passion and eagerness for the role and business Do your homework. Know your competency It’s not just about knowing the answer, but how you got there Never stop learning, take on challenges

Jonathan gives his newer engineers to research about certain things like RFCs and have them write blogs about them. Specifically, he does this to look for passion in people that do this.

What are some important tips that Jonathan learned along the way?