Omar Santos

Omar Santos is a leading figure in the Cybersecurity world. He first discovered the subject while serving in the US Marine Corps in the mid 1990s, where he helped protect critical infrastructure and provided secure communications between troops. Today, Omar is Principal Engineer at Cisco’s Product Security Incident Response Team (PSIRT). He uses all his experience to help junior team members learn and is called upon to investigate serious security vulnerabilities. Omar also leads several industry-defining groups and is the author of over 20 books as well as numerous video titles and online courses.

The world of Cybersecurity

It’s a vast subject area, with several subsections and divisions – ethical hacking, incident response, digital forensics, malware analysis, network security, cloud security, and DevSecOps are just a few. So how does Omar help people understand what can be very complex topics? “My biggest advice is to pick the concentration that you are most passionate about,” says Omar. ”Don’t try to learn everything at once! You can apply different security concepts in your daily work (whether you are a software developer or a project manager). Combine reading with hands-on practice all the time!”. It’s an ideology that Omar shares with Pearson as we collaborate on resources and learning seminars.

So it’s clear that keeping up with the latest information and continually learning are key to success as a Cybersecurity operative. Even during the COVID-19 pandemic Omar was called on to offer his guidance on a new wave of attacks – threats were coming in that targeted remote workers and learners, so experts like Omar had to act fast to educate the wider community. “Many different things changed forever after the COVID-19 pandemic,” Omar says. “The way we work remotely has changed. Organizations should continue to update their policies and processes to ensure resiliency in the next few years.”

The future of Cybersecurity

Staying on top of the latest threats means being able to educate people at speed and give them access to the right resources. It’s something Pearson has worked on with Omar for many years. From digital textbooks to online learning courses, we’ve created a clear way to get new information out there – something that will prove crucial as technology evolves even more. “We are using AI and machine learning to automate tasks, process data, and make decisions faster,” explains Omar. “However, we will also face new threats against these systems. The industry will continue to focus on cyber warfare threats, as the adversaries are becoming more sophisticated and with significantly more resources than in past years.”