May 14 02:14:01 prod-web-04 sshd[14202]: Failed password for root from 192.168.1.45 port 54322 ssh2
May 14 02:14:05 prod-web-04 sshd[14202]: Accepted password for root from 192.168.1.45 port 54322 ssh2
May 14 02:14:06 prod-web-04 systemd[1]: Starting User Manager for UID 0…
May 14 02:14:06 prod-web-04 systemd-logind[645]: New session 142 of user root.
Table of Contents
whoami
root
uname -a
Linux prod-web-04 6.1.0-21-amd64 #1 SMP PREEMPT_DYNAMIC Debian 6.1.90-1 (2024-05-03) x86_64 GNU/Linux
history -c
export HISTFILE=/dev/null
[00:00 UTC] – The Initial Triage of a Dying Dream
The fluorescent lights in this room have a specific frequency that vibrates inside your skull after the third day. It’s a low-pitched hum, a mechanical dirge for the weekend I’ll never get back. You’re reading this because you saw a billboard or a LinkedIn post about the “booming market” for cybersecurity jobs. You saw a salary figure with six digits and a stock photo of a guy in a hoodie looking at a screen full of green falling text. You thought you’d be a digital paladin.
Sit down. Drink this coffee. It’s been sitting in the pot since Tuesday, and it tastes like copper and regret.
The reality of cybersecurity jobs isn’t a high-speed chase through a 3D grid. It’s staring at a hex dump of a corrupted memory segment in gdb at 4:00 AM, trying to figure out why a pointer is jumping to an address that shouldn’t exist. It’s realizing that the “secure” supply chain you’ve been trusting is actually held together by a single, exhausted maintainer in Nebraska who hasn’t updated his dependencies since 2017.
We just spent 72 hours chasing a ghost. It wasn’t a sophisticated AI. It wasn’t a nation-state actor using a zero-day they bought for three million dollars. It was a script that exploited a misconfigured Jenkins pipeline and a developer who thought “password123” was a fine temporary credential for a production database. That’s the job. It’s cleaning up after people who don’t care, using tools that barely work, while management asks you for a “status update” every fifteen minutes.
If you want a career where you feel like a hero, go join the fire department. At least they get to break windows. Here, you just get to watch the building burn in slow motion while you document the exact temperature of the flames for an insurance adjuster who will find a way to blame you anyway.
[04:30 UTC] – Dependency Hell and the Supply Chain Lie
We’re currently running Linux Kernel 6.1.0-21-amd64 on the production nodes. We thought we were safe. We patched for CVE-2024-3094. We checked the liblzma versions. We ran strings /usr/sbin/sshd | grep 'LLVM'. We thought we were ahead of the curve. But that’s the thing about cybersecurity jobs—you’re never ahead. You’re just less behind than the guy next to you.
The supply chain is a lie. We talk about “Software Bill of Materials” (SBOM) like it’s a holy grail, but it’s just a list of things that are already broken. Look at the OpenSSL 3.0.13 update. Look at how many libraries depend on it. Now look at your grep output when you search for every instance of libssl.so on a standard enterprise image.
find / -name "libssl.so*" 2>/dev/null
The output is a mile long. Half of those are shadowed copies bundled into containers by developers who don’t know what a shared library is. They’ve pinned their versions to 2021 because “it breaks the build” if they update. So you sit there, looking at a vulnerable libcrypto.so.1.1 that’s been statically linked into a proprietary binary you can’t even decompile without violating a DMCA clause.
This is what they don’t tell you in the “Introduction to Cybersecurity” bootcamps. They teach you how to use nmap -sS -sV on a lab network where everything is perfectly configured to be found. They don’t teach you how to handle a situation where nmap triggers a legacy industrial control system to reboot, shutting down a cooling fan in a server room three states away. They don’t teach you the sheer, paralyzing fear of hitting “Enter” on a tcpdump -i eth0 -w traffic.pcap command on a saturated 10Gbps link, knowing you’re about to fill the disk and crash the kernel.
[09:15 UTC] – Technical Debt as a Career Path
You want to know why cybersecurity jobs are so stressful? It’s not the hackers. It’s the debt. Technical debt is the interest you pay on being lazy, and in this industry, we’re all bankrupt.
I spent six hours tonight looking at a strace output for a process that was hung.
strace -p 4502 -e trace=network,file
The process was trying to open a config file that didn’t exist, falling back to a hardcoded IP address that belonged to a company we acquired and then sold in 2014. The packet was timing out, but the error handling was so poorly written that it just sat there in a poll() loop, eating 100% of a CPU core.
This is the “glamour” of the field. You aren’t “hacking the Gibson.” You are a digital archeologist digging through layers of trash left behind by people who got promoted for shipping features on time, leaving you to deal with the security implications of their “agile” shortcuts.
The certifications you’re studying for? They’re useless. I don’t care if you have a CISSP or a CEH. Can you write a python script to parse 40GB of JSON logs because the SIEM is too slow? Can you use awk to extract unique IP addresses from a web server log while the server is under a DDoS attack?
awk '{print $1}' access.log | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr | head -n 20
If you can’t do that, you aren’t an incident responder. You’re a spectator. And the “cybersecurity jobs” market is full of spectators. People who know the theory but have never felt the heat of a production environment melting down because of a logic bomb hidden in a npm package.
[14:45 UTC] – The Certification Industrial Complex
Let’s talk about the gatekeeping. The HR departments have no idea what we do. They look for keywords. They want “Cloud Security” and “Zero Trust” and “AI-Driven Threat Detection.” Those aren’t real things. They are marketing terms designed to sell software that costs more than the annual salary of the entire SOC team.
“Zero Trust” is just a fancy way of saying “we finally realized that our internal network is as toxic as the public internet.” “AI-Driven” is just a series of if-else statements written by an intern in Bangalore.
When you look for cybersecurity jobs, you’ll see requirements for five years of experience in a tool that was released eighteen months ago. You’ll see entry-level positions that require a CISSP—a certification that literally requires five years of professional experience to obtain. The system is broken, and it’s designed to filter out the people who actually know how to fix things in favor of the people who are good at taking multiple-choice tests.
I’ve interviewed “Senior Security Engineers” who couldn’t tell me the difference between a TCP SYN scan and a full connect scan. They knew the “best practices” for “securing the enterprise,” but they didn’t know how to use netstat -tulpn to see what was actually listening on a box.
netstat -tulpn | grep LISTEN
If you want to survive in this field, stop reading the textbooks. Start reading the man pages. Start reading the source code of the tools you use. Go look at the xz backdoor source. Look at how it hooked rsa_get_public_key in OpenSSH. That’s where the real knowledge is. Not in a slide deck from a “thought leader” at a conference in Vegas.
[19:00 UTC] – The Psychological Attrition of the SOC
There is a specific kind of exhaustion that comes from being right and being ignored. We told them six months ago that the VPN was vulnerable. We told them that the lack of multi-factor authentication on the legacy admin portal was a ticking time bomb. We even gave them the nmap output showing the open ports.
nmap -p 443,8443,8080 --script ssl-enum-ciphers 10.0.5.22
They told us it wasn’t in the budget. They told us the “user experience” would suffer if we added another step to the login process. Then the breach happened. And who did they call at 2:00 AM on a Saturday? Not the “User Experience” team. Not the CFO who cut the budget. They called us.
This is the psychological toll of cybersecurity jobs. You are the person who has to say “I told you so” while you’re working 20-hour shifts to fix the problem you warned them about. You become cynical. You start to see every user as a threat and every new feature as a vulnerability.
You spend your life looking for the worst in everything. You look at a smart toaster and you don’t see a convenient way to make breakfast; you see a Linux-based computer with a hardcoded root password and a direct connection to your home network. You look at a “smart city” and you see a massive, unpatchable attack surface.
The burnout rate in this industry is astronomical. People last three, maybe four years before they quit and go open a bakery or become a carpenter. Something where the things you build don’t try to betray you. Something where you can see the results of your work at the end of the day, instead of just a slightly lower number of “Critical” alerts in a dashboard.
[23:30 UTC] – Persistence Mechanisms and Career Stagnation
The attackers are still in the network. I can feel them. We’ve cleared the obvious web shells. We’ve rotated the API keys. We’ve reset the passwords. But they’re still there, hiding in the noise. Maybe they’ve got a persistence mechanism in a systemd timer we haven’t found yet.
systemctl list-timers --all
Maybe they’ve modified a binary in /usr/local/bin that isn’t checked by the package manager. We’re running debsums -c but that only checks the files that came from the official repositories.
debsums -c | grep -v "OK$"
The uncertainty is what kills you. In most jobs, when you finish a task, it’s done. In cybersecurity jobs, you’re never done. You just reach a point where you’re too tired to keep looking, or the business decides the remaining risk is “acceptable.”
“Acceptable risk” is corporate-speak for “we’re tired of paying you overtime, so we’re going to cross our fingers and hope they don’t come back.”
And you? You’re stuck in the middle. You’re the one who will be held accountable when the “acceptable risk” turns into a headline in the Wall Street Journal. You’ll be the “fall guy” because you were the last one to touch the system.
The career path here isn’t a ladder; it’s a treadmill. You have to run as fast as you can just to stay in the same place. The moment you stop learning, the moment you stop reading the mailing lists and the CVE feeds, you’re obsolete. There is no “coasting” in security. There is only the hunt and the hunted.
[03:00 UTC] – The Reality of the SOC Floor
The coffee is gone. The spite is all that’s left. I’m looking at a packet capture in Wireshark—well, the CLI version, tshark, because the GUI crashes on a file this big.
tshark -r suspicious_traffic.pcap -Y "http.request.method == POST" -T fields -e http.host -e ip.dst
I see the exfiltration. It’s happening right now. They’re tunneling data out over DNS queries. It’s clever. It’s slow. It’s almost beautiful in its simplicity.
tcpdump -i eth0 'udp port 53' -vv
The packets are small, but they’re consistent. Each one carries a few bytes of the customer database. And I’m sitting here, writing this, because I want you to understand what you’re signing up for.
Cybersecurity jobs aren’t about the technology. They’re about the people. The people who break things, the people who fail to fix things, and the people like us, who are stuck in the middle trying to make sense of the chaos.
If you still want the job after reading this, then maybe you’re the right kind of crazy. Maybe you’re the kind of person who finds comfort in the man pages and the hex editors. Maybe you’re the kind of person who doesn’t mind the 3:00 AM calls and the cold coffee.
But don’t say nobody warned you. Don’t say you thought it would be different. This is the reality. It’s messy, it’s thankless, and it’s never-ending.
Wait. The IDS just flagged a new connection from an IP in a range we blocked an hour ago.
iptables -L -n -v | grep 192.168.1.45
How did they get around the firewall? Did they compromise the edge router?
I have to go. The pager is vibrating on the desk, and the hum of the server room just got a little louder. There’s another breach to mitigate, another fire to put out, and another 72 hours of my life to lose to the void.
Good luck with your “career.” You’re going to need it.
[03:14 UTC] – ALERT: Multiple failed logins on prod-db-01.
[03:14 UTC] – ALERT: Unauthorized access detected on core-switch-01.
[03:15 UTC] – LOG: Initiating emergency shutdown of segment B…
[03:15 UTC] – ERROR: Connection refused.
[03:15 UTC] – ERROR: Connection refused.
[03:15 UTC] – ERROR: Connection refused.
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