Teaching security, in two languages.

Nikolas Behar — cybersecurity expert and professor at the University of San Diego.

I have been interviewed over 50 times by San Diego news outlets since 2019, over 10 of them in Spanish.

A few years ago a hospital hired me to find out how far someone could get from outside the building. I sat in a rental car across the street with an antenna on the passenger seat, connected to the Wi-Fi from the curb, and reached a heart monitor on the network. That afternoon is the reason I teach the way I do — students get the version where the attack works, not the version where the diagram is tidy.

I am a cybersecurity expert and professor at the University of San Diego, where I teach offensive security and help students make the jump from theory into practice. I also teach at Palomar College and San Diego City College.

Outside the classroom I co-lead the San Diego chapter of OWASP, the open community behind much of the world's application security guidance, and I co-founded La Villa Hacker, which brings a Spanish-language security community together each year at DEF CON.

Newsrooms call me when something breaks — NBC 7, Telemundo 20, ABC 10News, KPBS and FOX 5 among them, over 50 times since 2019. Often the same story runs twice in one week, once in English and once in Spanish, because there are very few people in this market who will do the technical version in both.

I am a Red Team Consulting Manager at EY.

I hold the CISSP and OSCP certifications. I speak regularly at BSides and OWASP events, most recently on the security of AI agents and the Model Context Protocol.

NBC 7 introduced me on air as a San Diego cybersecurity expert; Telemundo 20 ran the same segment in Spanish as “experto de ciberseguridad de San Diego.” Those are their words, and the segments on record are where they came from.

Views expressed here are my own.

Background

I hold an M.Sc. in Information Security from the University of London and a B.A. in Political Science from UC San Diego. Before teaching became the center of what I do publicly, I spent fifteen years in offensive security — red teaming, adversary simulation, and application security.

Where I teach

• University of San Diego — Adjunct Professor of Cybersecurity
• San Diego City College — Adjunct Professor
• Palomar College — Adjunct Professor
• CSU San Marcos — Lecturer in Cybersecurity (former)

Why this site exists

Most cybersecurity writing aimed at small businesses is produced by someone selling something, and it shows — the advice bends toward the product. The guides here are written the way I would explain it to a class, or to a friend who has just had a worrying email and one evening to deal with it.