Too young for the room

The cybersecurity industry faces an increasingly important problem. The pipeline of emerging talent is made to be difficult for the young. Seniority bias, credentialism, and institutional gatekeeping leave younger and entry level practitioners either invisible or dismissed, even as the field desperately needs the adaptive, assumption-free thinking that youth uniquely produce. Meanwhile, senior practitioners with children of their own find themselves without a roadmap. How do you guide a young person into an industry that wasn't built to receive them? Rarely will the answer be found in a curriculum of certification pathway, it would be easier found in the life of one who lives it.

This talk traces the journey of 15-year-old Somindu Abeydeera (my son) from picking locks in silence, winning physical security competitions, AISA CyberCon 2024 Locksport competition, to standing on stages at BSides Melbourne, , BSides Adelaide, and Kids SecuriDay. Not as a prodigy narrative, but as a case study in how passion compounds into fluency when it is allowed to follow its own logic rather than institutional timelines.

Drawing on his own transition from solving physical security CTF like Locksport competitions to enter and thrive in cyber security, Somindu will examine the psychology of domain transfer. What survives when you shed one identity for another, what the infiltrator mindset looks like across disciplines, and why the absence of institutional grounding is sometimes the sharpest tool a practitioner can carry. The talk will explore how adaptive thinkers build expertise outside conventional pipelines, why the industry's seniority bias leaves emerging talent structurally invisible, and what it costs the field when the younger, less experienced and diverse voices are the last ones given a room.

This talk aims not to be a highlight reel, but to be focused on the part no one sees, what happens in the dark, the part that matters most. For the young people trying to find their way in, and for the senior practitioners trying to show them one.