The moment Cybersecurity clicked for me?

I was in a library in Lakewood, Ohio. Nice artsy neighborhood, kids getting out of school and being loud, that bit. 

I saw a man in his 60s with gadgets and gizmos linked to a ~2000 workbook, real clunky, and I thought, “there are countless measures in place keeping this man’s info safe and none of them are what’s on that table.”

In 2026, privacy is odd. Sensitive information is odd. And the way companies store and manage this data, particularly odd. 

A man in his 60s who’s a bit paranoid thinks that a macbook motherboard SATA’d into an unplugged switch with an ethernet cable to his laptop is going to keep his phone browsing safe because the laptop from the year 2000 is creating a jamming signal that acts as a VPN.

Sounds silly to us, the practitioners, but this is the state of the world.

Some folks are a bit more expressive about their wrongness, but most are just as wrong.

In 2025, I thought the internet consisted of satellite dishes that broadcast radio waves via earth’s magnetic field and that interference was mainly due to ozone disruptions thanks to solar flares. 

The internet is light running through cables. It’s a network, just really really big. Like how the universe is really really big and planets are complicated alone, but in the universe (which by the way is really really big), there are more planets than you could count in the time you have on this one. That’s the internet.

And the old man sitting next to me in the library? He’s protected by defense in depth. PCI DSS, plus

Firewalls 

Honeypots

IAM, NAC, VPNs, DMZs, VLANs, SOAR, SIEM, EDR, AV, IPS, IDS…

and the many boys and girls who put that together, monitor it, and are constantly fighting to keep it up-to-date. 

Does that seem like a lot? It is. But that’s when it clicked for me. 

It didn’t click because I saw someone who’s a little more worried than they should be. It clicked because I studied fervently for months on end, taking in cyber media, textbooks, tryhackmes, and calling Hayden multiple times a week to clarify things like, “Wait, how’s a stateless firewall not stateful if it still has rules that are remembered?” THEN I saw someone who was obviously worried for their cyber security and asked myself the big one.

What’s really keeping his data safe?

That’s when it clicked for me.

…

Was that article convincing? Well, it wasn’t the full truth. The anecdotes are true, the old man is real, and I did ask that question– but that’s just it, I landed on questions that day.

I wanted to write an article called “The Moment Cybersecurity Clicked for Me.” Something relatable, fun, a bit wry. But as I proofread #1, I realized I wrote a piece of near-fiction that would do very nicely in a LinkedIn and not so hot against a polygraph.

If you’re alright with reality, read ahead to the real article. If you’re not so privy to hotter takes, try my “Why I Started Solving Cyber,” a nice little number on my life story.  

The moment Cybersecurity clicked for me.

Cybersecurity doesn’t click like a seatbelt. It doesn’t unlock like a safe. It doesn’t send an MFA authentication key to your email, get confirmed, and go, “alright you’re in.” 

Cybersecurity clicks like a jigsaw puzzle. 

You’ve got 200 pieces of Cloud Services, 100 of public facing sites, 300 of proxy + perimeter + endpoint firewalls, 150 of perimeter defenses, 100 of internal network defenses, 200 of endpoint protection, 50 of email protection, and ??? for AI security.

SIEMs took up a whole domain of BTL1 and a lot of Tryhackme’s, and with good reason. I put together hundreds of puzzle pieces, months of clicking noises in my head before the gears got going.

SIEMs clicked when I uploaded a model dataset to Splunk in a Tryhackme room. Having to configure the upload process was new to me. The number of steps required from sourcetype, index, to post-upload options helped me to understand why and how I was to search for data inside the dataset. 

Did cybersecurity make sense to me because of SIEMs? Good lord, no. Cybersecurity as an infrastructural model made sense to me after I did the equivalent of 50 of those. 

I spent my first months compiling puzzle pieces, hoping to shell out some kind of shape. Sometimes I’d jam pieces together that didn’t really fit– I remember trying to configure a firewall rule against a GPO, but the GPO already had conflicting rulesets (because I misconfigured that earlier in the same lab!). But you unbend the edges and find the right piece eventually.

I had about 1200 Google Doc pages filled with notes. Most pages I counted had about 6 relevant points, so that’s like 7200 pieces of info? 

So yeah, Cybersecurity clicked for me after one moment. 

Or I guess, more specifically, Cybersecurity as a concept, infrastructure, career path, and professional identity clicked for me one moment after 6 months of effort. 

Or I guess, most specifically, Cybersecurity made enough sense to work in, and work with, after 7200 other connections had to click.

That’s the moment Cybersecurity clicked for me. Now, if this answer felt a bit too wry, read the first take again and forget you ever came here.