Security News > 2021 > April > What Does It Take To Be a Cybersecurity Researcher?
Behind the strategies and solutions needed to counter today's cyber threats are-dedicated cybersecurity researchers.
What drives these specialists? To understand the motivations for why these cybersecurity pros do what they do, we decided to talk with cybersecurity analysts from around the world.
To get viewpoints from across Europe, Asia, and the Americas, we recently spoke with a team of researchers from Acronis' global network of Cyber Protection Operations Centers: Candid Wüest, VP of Cyber Protection Research who is based in Switzerland; Alexander Ivanyuk, Senior Director, Product, and Technology Positioning, who is based in Singapore; and two Cybersecurity Analysts, Topher Tebow and Blake Collins, who are both based in the U.S. The conversation yielded some interesting insights into their views of the world, how they approach cyber threat analysis, and what risks stand out as the greatest challenges facing the cybersecurity field today.
From a technical perspective, Collins says, "The sheer volume of malware that exists surprises me. If you follow cybersecurity news, you have a general idea that malware is everywhere, causing problems. But behind the scenes, you begin to appreciate how astonishingly high the number of malware variants is."
While Ivanyuk points to classics like the Stuxnet attack and the recent SolarWinds hack as good examples, Collins notes it's not always the sophistication of an attack that's impressive.
All four of these cybersecurity researchers agreed that ransomware remains the greatest security threat today - particularly given the pivot from simple data encryption to data exfiltration.