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.

I am a professor of cybersecurity 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.

San Diego newsrooms call me when something breaks. I have been interviewed over 50 times by San Diego news outlets — NBC 7, Telemundo 20, ABC 10News, KPBS, and FOX 5 among them — explaining outages, scams, and breaches in both English and Spanish. Bilingual technical commentary is genuinely scarce, and it is some of the most useful work I do.

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 centre 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

Why this site exists

Most cybersecurity writing aimed at small businesses is produced by someone selling something. I am a professor, not a vendor, so the guides here are written the way I would explain it to a class — or to a friend who just got a worrying email.