I Want So Many Trinkets And Clips And Bits On My Traveler’s Journal That It Takes Me 5 Minutes To Even

vintage stamps

4.21.25

Today went a little bit better than it has been lately. I managed to lock in over the weekend and finish quite a bit of problem sets for discrete math. Final exam this week 🤌

08.04.2025

• I have so many half finished drafts and I’m just going to forget about them and move on.

• I’m doing a productivity challenge and I haven’t posted once and I’ve highkey been slacking but I’m here so things are looking up. I’ll start making the posts about that tomorrow.

• The past weeks have been good but also not. I feel like I never seem to thrive at multiple things at once. But I won’t stop trying.

• I did some viola practice and also vocab Flashcards. The performance might be in July and I can play one of the pieces fairly well and the other isn’t too hard so I’ll definitely be ready by then.

• Unfortunately I have two exams in July and the chances of the performance and an exam being on the same day is insanely high. All I have to do to avoid disaster is start studying early enough and take my time and also practice consistently till then. Give myself no reason to crash and burn. Very simple. Haha.

• I decided to set some non-negotiable tasks for the productivity challenge. I plan to keep at them afterwards though. Preferably for the entire quarter. I’m aiming at forming some new habits.

• It’s nice to feel determined again, I just hope I can hold on to it.

🌳: 37mins

📖: The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern. I actually haven’t touched it in a week but whatever💀.

☀️: Bumped into a friend and also called my mom.

An Introduction to Cybersecurity

I created this post for the Studyblr Masterpost Jam, check out the tag for more cool masterposts from folks in the studyblr community!

What is cybersecurity?

Cybersecurity is all about securing technology and processes - making sure that the software, hardware, and networks that run the world do exactly what they need to do and can't be abused by bad actors.

The CIA triad is a concept used to explain the three goals of cybersecurity. The pieces are:

Confidentiality: ensuring that information is kept secret, so it can only be viewed by the people who are allowed to do so. This involves encrypting data, requiring authentication before viewing data, and more.

Integrity: ensuring that information is trustworthy and cannot be tampered with. For example, this involves making sure that no one changes the contents of the file you're trying to download or intercepts your text messages.

Availability: ensuring that the services you need are there when you need them. Blocking every single person from accessing a piece of valuable information would be secure, but completely unusable, so we have to think about availability. This can also mean blocking DDoS attacks or fixing flaws in software that cause crashes or service issues.

What are some specializations within cybersecurity? What do cybersecurity professionals do?

incident response

digital forensics (often combined with incident response in the acronym DFIR)

reverse engineering

cryptography

governance/compliance/risk management

penetration testing/ethical hacking

vulnerability research/bug bounty

threat intelligence

cloud security

industrial/IoT security, often called Operational Technology (OT)

security engineering/writing code for cybersecurity tools (this is what I do!)

and more!

Where do cybersecurity professionals work?

I view the industry in three big chunks: vendors, everyday companies (for lack of a better term), and government. It's more complicated than that, but it helps.

Vendors make and sell security tools or services to other companies. Some examples are Crowdstrike, Cisco, Microsoft, Palo Alto, EY, etc. Vendors can be giant multinational corporations or small startups. Security tools can include software and hardware, while services can include consulting, technical support, or incident response or digital forensics services. Some companies are Managed Security Service Providers (MSSPs), which means that they serve as the security team for many other (often small) businesses.

Everyday companies include everyone from giant companies like Coca-Cola to the mom and pop shop down the street. Every company is a tech company now, and someone has to be in charge of securing things. Some businesses will have their own internal security teams that respond to incidents. Many companies buy tools provided by vendors like the ones above, and someone has to manage them. Small companies with small tech departments might dump all cybersecurity responsibilities on the IT team (or outsource things to a MSSP), or larger ones may have a dedicated security staff.

Government cybersecurity work can involve a lot of things, from securing the local water supply to working for the big three letter agencies. In the U.S. at least, there are also a lot of government contractors, who are their own individual companies but the vast majority of what they do is for the government. MITRE is one example, and the federal research labs and some university-affiliated labs are an extension of this. Government work and military contractor work are where geopolitics and ethics come into play most clearly, so just… be mindful.

What do academics in cybersecurity research?

A wide variety of things! You can get a good idea by browsing the papers from the ACM's Computer and Communications Security Conference. Some of the big research areas that I'm aware of are:

cryptography & post-quantum cryptography

machine learning model security & alignment

formal proofs of a program & programming language security

security & privacy

security of network protocols

vulnerability research & developing new attack vectors

Cybersecurity seems niche at first, but it actually covers a huge range of topics all across technology and policy. It's vital to running the world today, and I'm obviously biased but I think it's a fascinating topic to learn about. I'll be posting a new cybersecurity masterpost each day this week as a part of the #StudyblrMasterpostJam, so keep an eye out for tomorrow's post! In the meantime, check out the tag and see what other folks are posting about :D

25/05/15

Could not, for the life of me, get the lighting to cooperate in the library. I did, however, get a metric shit ton of work done.

15.03.25 || wishing everyone a good day unless you are caesar

Started my day working on a writing project I love but has no publisher. Fingers crossed that it will get a contract. Someone came to see my apartment today and hopefully take it over. It's a bittersweet moment, because I feel like I just arrived in my uni town and get to fully experience it after my exams took over my life for a good two years. And now I have to leave again 🥲

All the best

AJ

Dear everyone who is currently working on a Thing, whatever that Thing may be,

Good luck with the Thing. You can do the Thing. You will do the Thing. You just have to do the Thing.

Best wishes,

Someone who is also doing a Thing

fucking love when I'm on a call with someone and they start to do a little errand or go somewhere else and they say "and you're coming with me" like. absolutely I am let's go on an adventure I've been spirited away

Oh ok so it turns out ive been borrowing grief from the future ! it turns out ive been preparing to lose the things i love rather than basking in the light of them while they last. Maybe i should nt do that