Cloud Security, Shadow IT, and Breaking Into the Field with rekdt

Most advice about breaking into cybersecurity tells you to follow the path. rekdt makes the opposite case: the path is exactly what makes you look like everyone else. In this episode he shares a candid, sometimes contrarian view of the field, shaped by nearly two decades in it.

rekdt runs a cloud security tower for a large enterprise operating across multiple clouds, and he came up through the professional cloud world during his time at AWS. He is also a longtime fixture in the hacker community, volunteering with the DEF CON Social Engineering Community and helping out at Red Team Village. His start in tech goes back to a teenage fascination with dial-up, the piracy and IRC scene, and picking apart malicious code on early MySpace pages, before a winding route through bartending and help desk work led him into engineering and eventually security.

In this episode, rekdt and Phillip get into why the most interesting security conversations happen at cloud and developer conferences rather than security echo chambers, how cloud and containers upended traditional defenses, and why shadow IT and vibe coding are making things harder. rekdt explains why cybersecurity is really a people problem, what actually makes a candidate stand out when everyone has the same resume, and why he sometimes asks people why they want to get into security at all.

He closes with honest, practical advice on building a career with an actual plan instead of just chasing the title.
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Connect with rekdt:
https://x.com/rekdt
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Connect with your host, Phillip Wylie:
LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/phillipwylie
X: https://x.com/PhillipWylie
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/phillipwylie