The Biggest Cybersecurity Skills & Trends in 2024

Table of Contents

• 3 Cybersecurity Skills for 2024 Job-Seekers
• 1. SOC Tools Centered Around SIEM
• 2. Artificial Intelligence Skills
• 3. Learning Programming Languages like JavaScript
• What to Expect: Cybersecurity Jobs in 2024
• Cybersecurity Certifications in 2024
• Looking Forward: 3 Cybersecurity Trends In 2024

In 2023, cybersecurity professionals had to adapt to the new capabilities created by artificial intelligence. Where will the trends go in 2024? Springboard’s cybersecurity expert, Mark Adams, shares his take on the top 3 cybersecurity skills you’ll need for 2024. Mark also gives us insight on which industries will be hiring cybersecurity professionals and the three big cyber trends to look for in 2024. Plus, find out how Springboard has fully renovated their Cybersecurity curriculum! 

3 Cybersecurity Skills for 2024 Job-Seekers

Some of these skills and tools for 2024 are aimed at cybersecurity folks further along in their career, but cybersecurity bootcamp students and career changers should take note to stay abreast of this evolving landscape! 

1. SOC Tools Centered Around SIEM

SIEM (Security Incident Event Management) is a dashboard that collects threat telemetry and logs from multiple sources, like endpoints, servers, cloud, mobile devices, any devices enabled to forward those logs. Based on your configuration and their intelligence, SIEM will sift through and attempt to eliminate the noise and things that you don't need to worry about and assist the analyst with focusing on those hopefully very few items that they need to investigate or be concerned about.

In 2024, you can expect a continuation of SOC (Security Operations Center) tools, but they will be centered mainly around SIEM technologies. SOC tools are not new tools, but we’re seeing greater integration between the end points or sources of the SIEM tools and their intelligence. Cybersecurity teams may have a third party vendor handle this for them or have their internal teams do it. If outsourced to a third party vendor, the cybersecurity team simply pulls up the dashboard to receive alerts to investigate.

2. Artificial Intelligence Skills

CrowdStrike is a leader in that third party cybersecurity monitoring space and they created Charlotte AI where the vendor has developers that use generative AI to feed and train it with threat telemetry, threat information from all of its sources and customers globally in order to train the AI to better identify threats and handle them.

On the flip side, we're also seeing threat actors use AI to bypass AI-enabled defenses. It's a new arms race that’s been escalated to AI versus AI. We’re seeing threat actors use AI to do things like use ChatGTP to create fake people and pretend to be a real person and make chatGPT do things for them. They’ve been successful at launching phishing campaigns, impersonation attempts, and things of that nature where you have to try and bypass defenses. It's one of those things where it just continues to escalate. You're never permanently ahead. You're almost always playing defense. In cybersecurity, you have to wait until we see what they do first and then create a defense for it.

So, will AI replace cybersecurity professionals in 2024?!

People want to know if we’ll reach a point where AI-enabled SIEM threat detection and response can eliminate people and do it all itself. The answer is no! We've gotten close but we’ll never get there. The example I use goes back to ancient Greek times: If you take a number and divide it by two, you'll never get to zero. You’ll get close -- really small numbers, but you'll never get to zero, and that's how it is with AI. Vendors will boast about eliminating up to 99% of the noise, but we’ll never get to zero. We’ll always need human beings to make any final decision and actually investigate and track down threats, which is something AI can’t do. 

3. Learning Programming Languages like JavaScript

You technically don't need to be a coder or programmer to be successful in cybersecurity, but if you have enough knowledge to figure out what a piece of code is doing, it can be very helpful when you're doing your investigation.

For example: If there's a payload, we have to grab the payload and then identify what it's trying to do. In my own experience, I once had a payload that was in JavaScript. We had to examine the JavaScript and figure out what it was trying to do. I didn’t need to be a JavaScript developer or expert, but it was helpful to be familiar with JavaScript.

Has Springboard adapted its Cybersecurity Career Track to help recent and incoming students remain relevant in the 2024 job market?

We are finishing up a major course update, which includes changes in response to the updated CompTIA Security+ exam that came out in 2023. We felt it was necessary to better equip students to pass the updated Security+ exam as well as the SC900, which is a Microsoft Azure Certification. Those are more relevant to what they're going to see in 2024. 

We’re also tweaking the bootcamp experience so it parallels the SOC Analyst experience. We’ll show students an example of a SIEM tool like Splunk and load it up with sample log data, sample threat telemetry, and then walk the student through how to identify it and ask them questions about it, like What IP address is the attack coming from? What threat is being reported? How would you handle it? That's what SOC analysts do on a daily basis. In the updated Cybersecurity Career Track, bootcampers can learn how to identify some sort of threat telemetry from a SIEM tool based on log data and figure it out.

I will continue to maintain the course throughout 2024, so whenever I get feedback from students or mentors or when things update in the industry, I reflect those needs in the curriculum. I make sure that any big changes get incorporated in the course. We want Springboard students to feel prepared for the exams and do well in an interview to land a job. 

What to Expect: Cybersecurity Jobs in 2024

With AI tools entering the scene in 2023, do you see any new cybersecurity roles coming onto the scene in 2024?

No specific new roles. The roles that I've been seeing in the last few years have been pretty static in terms of cybersecurity roles or titles. Employers are still using job titles like Cybersecurity Analyst, Cybersecurity Practitioner, Cybersecurity Engineer, and Cybersecurity Architect. But even though the job titles may be the same, that doesn’t mean that new technologies won’t be associated with the job! What I’m seeing is that the same titles are including more requirements and preferences. In general, they’re asking more from the same title role. 

Do you see a certain industry or certain companies that will be hiring more cybersecurity professionals in 2024?

• Banking, finance and fintech are always looking for people because they are the most heavily regulated organizations on the planet, aside from the military. 
• Department of Defense. Getting your government security clearance can open up roles as a defense contractor or a third party service provider to the Department of Defense. 
• Medical and health are always industries that need help, since people get sick regardless of the economy.
• Regulatory compliance. The number of regulations and the number of requirements to meet them never goes down. HIPAA, HITECH, PCI, DSS, payment card industry, and data security standards for payment card processors are continually updating their requirements. Regulatory compliance is a huge driver of cybersecurity and what companies are required to abide by. Any industry that's heavily regulated (such as payment cards or health information) will always be looking for people.
• Oil and gas, energy. Whenever gas prices are up, they're hiring. It depends on the price of a commodity, but they still need people.

Cybersecurity Certifications in 2024

CompTIA is always updating their certification exams. What we're seeing is more certifications and more specialized certifications, like the SSCP (System Security Certified Practitioner) from ISC2.org or the CISSP, which has actually been out since the 1990s and continues to get updated.

I'm seeing specialization certifications I've never seen before: the CSSLP is secure software development, ISSEP is security engineering, ISSAP is security architecture, CCSP is cloud security, and CGRC (governance risk and compliance). There are also new certifications associated with Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services, which are continuously updated. 

Looking Forward: 3 Cybersecurity Trends In 2024

In 2023, we saw growth in trends like Cybersecurity Resilience (as in, the ability to recover from a breach) and Zero Trust Security (when a system doesn’t trust users from outside or inside a network so requires verification). In 2024, here are the 3 trends I expect we’ll see:  

1. A Rise in Specializations in Cybersecurity

I’ve been in IT for over 30 years and back in the day it was actually possible to know everything because there wasn't much. Now, with the internet, social media, and so much new technology, it's impossible for any one person to know everything. This leads to an increasing need for cybersecurity professionals to specialize. It’s a double-edged sword because specializing allows you to be really good at specific topics or skill sets (which hopefully command a higher salary!), but the downside is if your focus goes out of fashion, you will have to pivot.

Pivoting is a part of an IT career -- I had to pivot to virtualization, then cloud, and will continue to pivot to stay relevant. Talk to people, get involved, go to conferences, and be aware of what those changes are, then realize what you need to do to remain marketable.

2. AI & Machine Learning

AI and machine learning are huge in 2023, and will continue to have a significant impact and effect on the field. People are wondering if they should learn AI to launch a cybersecurity career. If you’re in cybersecurity, learn how to use AI specifically for cybersecurity. 

3. Cybersecurity Insurance

We can’t expect data breaches to cease in 2024, so the demand for cybersecurity insurance will continue to rise.

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