Course · 2023
Découvrez l'univers de la cybersécurité
[Discover the world of cybersecurity — free online course, OpenClassrooms, 2023]
Further links
Free introductory course on the fundamentals and professions of cybersecurity, built around a practical case study of an attack on a fictitious hospital.
This course has remained free and requires no prerequisites, which probably makes it the most useful resource in this library for a non-specialist reader. It set out to correct a perception: that of a technical profession reserved for engineers, when some forty different professions coexist in the sector, many of them non-technical.
Three years on, the figures I gave in it deserve to be checked against reality, and the result is not flattering for the way this sector talks about itself.
I cited 44,000 jobs and 15,000 unfilled positions in France, against a public target of 75,000 jobs by 2025. That target came from the national cybersecurity acceleration strategy, which started from 37,000 jobs in 2019. It can be assessed today, and the answer depends on the scope used: within a strict cybersecurity scope, the direction générale des entreprises (the directorate general for enterprises) measured 50,000 jobs in 2023, and the target was not within reach; within the broader scope of digital trust, the observatory of the Alliance pour la confiance numérique (the digital trust industry alliance) measures 107,000 jobs in 2024, and the target is well exceeded. Two ways of counting, two opposite conclusions.
I also cited an attack every 11 seconds worldwide and an annual cost of 5.5 trillion dollars. These figures circulate everywhere in the sector, including in official documents, and their methodological construction does not survive scrutiny. I repeated them without checking them. An awareness-raising discourse built on unverifiable orders of magnitude undermines itself, and cybersecurity does not need to be exaggerated to be a real problem.
On one point, the trajectory is real but slow. I noted that women made up 11% of the workforce. The cybersecurity professions observatory run by ANSSI (the French national cybersecurity agency) measured a profession that was 85% male in 2025. Four points in two years, against a gender-balance target every part of the sector claims as a priority: that says almost everything about the gap between declared intentions and the mechanisms actually at work.
On video
Presentation video produced as part of this course.
“Découvrez le Campus Cyber avec Yann Bonnet: un lieu clé de la cybersécurité en France” (in French).