Jeddah: Saudi has seen an influx in women coming forward to specialise in the field of cybersecurity.
Experts have confirmed that more Saudi women are interested in one of the Kingdom’s most in-demand sectors.
More than 3,000 participants applied for a three-month-long all-female cybersecurity bootcamp conducted by Farmers Insurance Co cloud security engineer Dalal Al-Harthi in June.
“I was very happy and encouraged to see this enthusiasm toward learning and that many women were interested in being part of this bootcamp, so I decided to accept as many applicants as I could,” she told Arab News.
A doctoral candidate in the US, Al-Harthi's trainees are mostly in Saudi Arabia.
During the bootcamp, she taught trainees about cybersecurity fields and areas including Linux Commands, Python Programming, Cloud Security, Network Security, Incident Response, Digital Forensics, SIEMs, Ethical Hacking – Penetration Testing, Cryptography, and CompTIA Security+.
“I designed it to be 20 per cent theoretical knowledge and 80 per cent hands-on practice on several cybersecurity tools and platforms such as AWS, Snort, Wireshark, PyCharm, Kleopatra, OpenSSL, MySQL, DVWA, BurpSuite, HTML, Splunk, Autopsy, John the Ripper, as well as working on Virtual Machines: Kali Linux, Tiny Core, Ubuntu, Metasploitable2, Windows 10, Windows Server 2016, and Raven.”
She also focused on how to get the participants employer-ready by enriching their resumes and polishing their interview skills.