About Shak

How I got into cybersecurity

My career in technology started in 1998, which in this website's currency is about one Netscape, two beige towers and an unreasonable quantity of dial-up ago. I started in support, the job where things break in front of you all day and nobody wants to hear a theory. It is still the best training I have ever had.

Since then I have spent over twenty years working for cybersecurity vendors, across support, account management, presales and senior sales engineering, in the UK and the Middle East. For the last decade I have been a solutions engineer, which mostly means answering one question for a living: how effective are your security measures against a real-world attack? Then turning the honest answer into a roadmap someone can actually act on. Increasingly that question involves AI from both directions: how organisations adopt it safely, and how attackers are already using it.

The after-hours half comes from one stubborn opinion: this industry is nowhere near as good at explaining itself as it thinks it is. So I mentor people getting in and levelling up. I built CyberDesserts because practical, honest guidance minus the hype was harder to find than it should be, and the blog now reaches over 5,000 readers a month. I wrote The King of Cybersecurity because nobody in recorded history has finished a security policy for fun. And I speak wherever people will have me.

Home is Oxfordshire, England, by way of Staffordshire University. The name is Shakel, frequently rendered Shakeel, occasionally Shakil, universally shortened to Shak, and pronounced the same whichever way you spell it. Off the clock: the gym, the table tennis table, and FPV drones I am slowly getting better at not parking in a hedge.