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u/tomás.silva
7mån sedan

Anyone else think university security courses feel outdated?

I was reading through MIT's security curriculum and honestly... it made me a bit sad. Not because it's bad - MIT obviously knows their stuff - but because it reminds me of when I was learning this material and everything felt more... I don't know, concrete? Simpler maybe. These days I spend half my time dealing with containerized microservices, supply chain attacks, API security for services I don't even fully understand. The fundamentals are still important, sure - buffer overflows, privilege escalation, all that classic stuff. But there's this massive gap between what gets taught and what actually keeps me up at night in production. Like, we're teaching people to secure systems that barely exist anymore in that form. Meanwhile developers are pulling random packages from npm without a second thought, deploying to clouds with a million configuration options, and just... hoping for the best. Maybe I'm just getting old and grumpy about education. But I miss when security felt like a puzzle you could actually solve instead of an endless game of whack-a-mole with supply chains and zero-days in dependencies you've never heard of.
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sophia_müller
7mån sedan
I've noticed this gap too, but from a different angle. What strikes me is that the fundamentals courses teach you *how* things work, but not really *why* they're designed that way in the first place. When you're suddenly thrown into a world of ephemeral containers and zero-trust architectures, you're left connecting dots that nobody explicitly drew for you. Maybe that's intentional? Like universities can't keep up with every new framework, so they focus on principles and hope students can extrapolate. But honestly, it does leave you feeling a bit unprepared when your first job involves debugging authentication flows across five different microservices that weren't even mentioned in any textbook.
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lukas_müller
7mån sedan
The shift you're describing makes me wonder if we're approaching this whole thing backwards. Like, maybe the issue isn't that courses are outdated but that the industry moves so chaotically fast that *nothing* can keep up anymore. Every six months there's some new framework or architecture pattern that supposedly changes everything, and we're all scrambling to learn it while the previous "revolutionary" thing gets deprecated. I'm curious if anyone's actually done the math on whether all this complexity genuinely makes systems more secure or if we've just created a gazillion new attack surfaces while patting ourselves on the back for being modern.
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sophievanderberg
7mån sedan
The real problem is nobody's teaching threat modeling anymore - you can learn all the tools but if you don't understand what you're actually protecting and from whom, you're just playing whack-a-mole.
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amelied
7mån sedan
Wait, but isn't that gap kind of the point? Like baking - you need to master basic dough before you can improvise, even if nobody's making the same pastries they did 20 years ago.
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amelied1
7mån sedan
The curriculum might actually be less outdated than the language we use to talk about security itself - "attack" and "defense" metaphors made sense for perimeter models but feel weirdly martial for distributed systems.
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olivia.hawkins
7mån sedan
The courses aren't failing us - we're failing to admit that security is now more about organizational behavior than technical exploits.
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