One of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world, confirmed a data breach on April 10th.
The threat actor behind it was Lapsus$, a cybercriminal group that has been on an absolute tear in 2026.
And AstraZeneca wasn’t alone that day.
On the same date, breach reports were confirmed for ACN Healthcare, Andean Community, and multiple other organizations across healthcare, finance, and critical infrastructure.
LockBit. Qilin. Lynx. Bashe. These aren’t names from a movie.
These are active ransomware groups operating right now, hitting organizations every single day, and posting stolen data on dark web leak sites within hours of a successful attack.
This is the world we live in.
Not a world where breaches happen occasionally to careless companies.
A world where breaches happen constantly, to companies with full security teams, firewalls, MFA, and compliance programs, because the attackers are faster, more organized, and more sophisticated than they’ve ever been.
27% of organizations in 2026 have experienced a breach they directly attribute to a skills gap on their security team. Not a technology gap. A people gap.That number came from the SANS Institute report I mentioned Monday.
And it points to something that should matter to you personally.
The breaches aren’t slowing down.
The attacks aren’t becoming less sophisticated.
If anything, AI is making threat actors faster and more effective than ever, the Hacker News reported just this week that AI has collapsed the human response window in cybersecurity incidents, turning remote access vulnerabilities into the fastest path to a breach that’s ever existed.
So here’s the reality of the IT job market in April 2026:
Companies are under attack daily.
Their internal teams are stretched thin.
Regulatory pressure is forcing aggressive hiring, compliance mandates around breach response, incident management, and infrastructure protection have never been stricter.
And the candidate pool of truly skilled, certified professionals is nowhere near large enough to meet the demand.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects 32% job growth for information security analysts over the next decade.
That’s not a projection for a healthy field, that’s a projection for a field in crisis, desperately trying to build a workforce big enough to keep pace with threats that aren’t waiting for anyone.
Now let me tell you where most beginners make their mistake in this environment.
They hear all of this, the breach stats, the job projections, the salary numbers, and they get excited.
They start researching. They watch videos. They read about Security+ and cloud certs and ethical hacking.
And then they do nothing, because the field feels so big and so technical that they don’t know where to put their foot first.
The answer is always the same. It has been the same for 20 years. And it hasn’t changed despite AI, despite cloud, despite every shift in the threat landscape.
You start with the A+.
Not because it’s the easiest cert. Because it’s the foundation that every other IT certification builds on. It teaches you how hardware works, how operating systems function, how networks are configured, how security vulnerabilities originate at the device level.
It’s the certification that hiring managers search for when they post help desk, desktop support, and junior tech roles.
It’s the credential that says to an employer: this person understands how IT actually works, not just what it is.
AstraZeneca got hit today because somewhere in a chain of systems and human decisions, a gap existed that an attacker exploited.
That gap, in knowledge, in configuration, in response, is exactly what trained, certified IT professionals exist to close.
You could be one of those professionals. The training exists. The roadmap is clear. The demand is real and documented and growing every single week.
The A+ Core 1 program to give you the fastest, most structured path from zero to certified.
It has produced an 81.2% documented pass rate across 15,000+ students.
And if you follow the program and don’t pass, I’ll pay for you to take it again.
→ See the A+ Core 1 Program
81.2% Pass Rate · Pay-If-You-Fail Guarantee
— Rob Roberts
Army Veteran · Founder, Master I.T. · 20+ Years in IT · 12+ CompTIA Certifications
P.S. Not sure if A+ is the right starting point for you specifically? The free quiz tells you in 2 minutes.
P.P.S. Friday’s email is going to hit different. There’s a shift happening in the job market right now that most people haven’t connected to their cert strategy yet. I’ll break it down then.