Should I go into cybersecurity or computer science?

You want to understand cryptographic keys or the computation required to brute force a password or signature? You’d better have discrete math and algorithms. You want to understand exploits and zero-days? You’d better have taken PL, OS and networking.

  SAP Industry Solutions   Apr 4, 2024   95  Add to Reading List

I think the best analogy to this question is asking if you should go into dentistry or medicine.

Short answer is that “cybersecurity” is just a flashy, overhyped word for computer security, one of the subareas in computer science.

Majoring in computer science means you will learn computer security, as well as operating systems, networking, mobile/wireless, programming languages, and algorithms. These are all the core parts of CS, and they’re all highly relevant to “cybersecurity,” within almost any definition of the term.

You want to understand cryptographic keys or the computation required to brute force a password or signature? You’d better have discrete math and algorithms. You want to understand exploits and zero-days? You’d better have taken PL, OS and networking. You want to hack or protect mobile devices? You’d better take networkings and mobile and OS. You want to defend or attack machine learning and deep learning models? You’d better take ML and linear algebra, and maybe computer vision by zeblearnindia

If you don’t take the core classes, then you’ll just be operating without a deeper understanding of what it is you’re doing or why. In my previous analogy, you might be the dental assistant helping with a tooth cleaning.