Bowen Mountain's Bryce Marchant is immersed in the murky world of cyber scams ... but he's one of the good guys looking to save you from the sharks.
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He's taking a leading role as a new generation digital defender in his final year studying a Bachelor of Cybersecurity degree at Western Sydney University and receiving frontline training at the university's newly launched Cybersecurity Aid Centre.
The world-first university embedded centre, called Western CACE, was launched last week with the help of more than $750,000 in funding from the Australian Government's Cyber Security Business Connect and Protect Grants Program to provide free services to tackle cyber crimes.
Bryce is one of 80 digital defender students who have been trained in cybersecurity incident response to work at Western CACE alongside government, industry and certification partners.
He has been appointed the role of team leader at the centre, such is the depth of his passion for problem solving and dedication to protecting the vulnerable.
"I really enjoy learning the inner workings of our digital landscape, which we now heavily rely on for so many aspects of our life," said Mr Marchant.
"This passion coupled with the enjoyment of complex problem solving has led me to become very passionate about cyber security as a whole."
"I aspire to work on major cyber security threats and attacks helping people with both mitigation and response. Western Sydney University does an amazing job at setting up closed digital environments for cyber security students to go over scenarios."
Mr Marchant said that while many of us have received phishing and scam emails, some are easily recognisable, while others succeed due to coincidence.
"The person I was helping had just ordered some items off Amazon and a few minutes after placing that order, they were sent an email regarding their 'recent amazon purchase'," he said.
"Once they saw the amount they had apparently been billed, they were unsure what had happened, and thankfully before proceeding to call the number on the email, they sought some advice.
"I was able to determine the email was not from Amazon and explained how these type of scam emails work and how best to detect them. In this instance the outcome was good, but unfortunately these types of attacks are still widely used and very successful at times."
