Rostrevor Magazine 2020-2021

Page 38 / Rostrevor Magazine 2020 - 2021 Rostrevor Graduate Becomes a “Guardian of Data” Just three years since Carter Smith (’17) graduated from Rostrevor College, he is employed as an “ethical hacker” helping Australian companies stay one step ahead of cyber criminals while completing his university degree. As one of the highest achievers in his 2017 Information Technology subject at Rostrevor College, Carter was offered a job with a cyber security firm just months into his IT Networks and Cyber Security degree at Flinders University. That firm has recently been taken over by Australia’s largest cyber security company, CyberCX, and Carter’s role is to look for weaknesses in company IT systems. “We basically go in and act like an attacker to find weaknesses in people’s computer systems before a genuine hacker can exploit them,” he says. “We collect as much open-source information as we can from the Internet - sort of stalk them. It’s work for me, but it doesn’t feel like work - it feels like I’m playing. One of the best elements of the job is that you’re always learning because it’s such an evolving field. There’s a great community around ethical hacking. It’s very altruistic - we are like the guardians of data.” CyberCX works with several large corporations in the power generation and transmission sectors as well as water and other critical infrastructure, government agencies, schools and smaller private firms. “Critical infrastructure is a massive target for financially-motivated hackers as well as nation states that want access to information about power and water networks and their employees and customers,” Carter says. Carter returns to Rostrevor College from time to time to catch up with his favourite teacher Vlad Baclagian and to offer encouragement and support to senior students contemplating a cyber security career. “When I was quite young and started to show interest in IT, Mr Vlad saw I had some potential and furthered it. You have to have an analytical mind – there is a lot of problem solving on the spot.” “There’s no shortage of jobs – companies are getting hacked every day and there’s no way hackers are going away,” he says. Carter has also established his own social media and Internet monitoring service named Stric which reveals what people are saying online about an organisation by gathering posts from a variety of social media platforms as well as public and private forums. “Increasingly organisations are becoming more dependent on their Internet brand but don’t have the time and resources to monitor and protect it,” Carter says. “Stric is a tool that maps what your organisation looks like on the internet, and how people perceive your brand.”