Page 56 - BusinessWest December 8, 2025

CYBERSECURITY >>
Evolving Threats
Sean O’Brien says cybersecurity
used to be seen as a niche issue
in many business sectors, but
has become a central concern.
Cybersecurity Offers
Promising Career Paths
BY JOSEPH BEDNAR
[email protected]
implications of artificial intelligence (AI)
As high-tech businesses grapple with the
— and workers worry what that might
mean for their job security — those who
work in cybersecurity may have reason
for optimism, Sean O’Brien said.
“Even though we’ve seen a shift, certainly, in IT
careers around AI — folks getting laid off and so on
— cybersecurity is still humming along. It’s one of
the hot industries, essentially,” O’Brien, director of
Cybersecurity at Bay Path University, recently told
BusinessWest.
A few days earlier, O’Brien had led Bay Path’s
13th annual Cybersecurity Summit, where he and
other experts discussed how artificial intelligence is
reshaping cybersecurity, education, and workforce
development, and what all that means for career
paths in this quickly evolving field.
Some young people might be scared off by what
they perceive as the highly technical nature of cyber-
security, but he emphasized that the field, and the
work being done within it, is strikingly diverse.
“One of the reasons I keep emphasizing the non-
technical nature of cybersecurity is because I think
that tech can scare people,” he said. “First off, we’re
talking about things that are actually scary — things
that keep me up at night. But also, people don’t
want to feel like they’re going to be a code monkey,
so to speak, sitting at a keyboard all day. So I try to
emphasize the more exciting cases, the sort of weird
and interesting stuff that we can do in cybersecurity.
“Cybersecurity is wide-ranging. There are people
who analyze malware — they look at what’s in our
software and how it spies on people and breaks their
stuff and steals their info, or even drains their Bitcoin
wallet, those kinds of things. There are folks who do
digital forensics work — they may be looking at evi-
dence and preparing it for a court case or even just
an investigation or an audit of an organization.”
Then there are people who work at security oper-
“In my time —
and I’ve been
doing this
since I was a
kid, essentially
— I have seen
technology
shift so
much, but the
fundamentals
don’t change.”
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