If you’ve spent any time in cybersecurity, you’ve probably met someone who sounds absolutely certain they’ve mastered it all after a few YouTube tutorials. Maybe you’ve even been that person. That’s not arrogance, it is the Dunning-Kruger effect in action.

What the Dunning-Kruger Effect Means

The Dunning-Kruger effect is what happens when people know just enough to overestimate their ability. It’s the moment you think you understand a topic right before you realize how much more there is to learn.

The name comes from psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger, who ran a series of studies in the 1990s which revealed that people who perform poorly on a task tended to overestimate their performance. Their results showed a simple truth: regardless of skill, most people think their abilities are above average.

In technology, this shows up in familiar ways. A beginner writes a few lines of Python and claims to have built a revolutionary app. Someone installs a VPN and believes they’re “unhackable.” Confidence often runs ahead of experience, not out of arrogance, but because the limits of a skill are invisible until you’ve spent considerable time inside it.

Even advanced practitioners can fall into a quieter version of the same trap. A network engineer might assume their firewall rules cover every scenario, only to discover a misconfigured port exposing internal systems.

Don’t Mistake Confidence for Competence

If you’re new to cybersecurity, the hardest thing isn’t learning the tools, it’s learning who to listen to. Many online spaces reward confidence, not accuracy. Forums, Discord channels, and YouTube comments are full of people who sound certain, but certainty is cheap. Real knowledge explains why something works, not just what to do.

Before taking advice, look for someone who admits what they don’t know. They’re often the ones worth learning from.

The Subtle Curve of Growth

This classic “Mount Stupid” graph paints a neat story: confidence soars, crashes, then climbs again with knowledge. It’s a good metaphor, but real growth isn’t always that tidyand self-awareness can develop unevenly.

Progress in cybersecurity isn’t about avoiding mistakes, it’s about calibrating your confidence to match your understanding. When your ego and your knowledge move in step, your knowledge and understanding deepens

How to Avoid the Dunning-Kruger Trap

• Keep learning even when you feel confident. Real skill isn’t a destination, it’s maintenance.
• Ask for feedback early and often. Don’t trust your instincts alone to judge your skill.
• Challenge your assumptions. If something feels obvious, double-check it. Most technical errors hide in what “everyone knows.”
• Watch for loud certainty online. The best experts usually explain, not declare.

Why the Internet Makes It Worse

The internet accelerates the illusion of knowledge. Everyone can Google a few terms, read an AI summary, and start giving advice. The illusion of knowledge spreads fast when there’s no built-in pause between “learning something” and “applying it”. Knowing where to click isn’t the same as understanding what’s happening under the hood.

Don’t Mistake Confidence for Competence

If you’re just starting out, be careful not to mistake confidence for competence. Online, certainty often outshines understanding. The trick is to listen critically. Ask questions, check sources, and test things yourself. Real understanding holds up under scrutiny. If someone can’t explain why something works, they probably don’t understand it as well as they think they do.

Keep Learning and Stay Curious

The good news is that most people eventually grow out of Mount Stupid. The best engineers, hackers, and sysadmins are the ones whose competence outpaces their confidence and aren’t afraid to admit when they don’t know something. Curiosity replaces confidence, and discussions start sounding more like: “What happens if I do this?” instead of “I already know how this works.”

In the end, the Dunning-Kruger effect isn’t just about ignorance. It’s a stage of learning, a rite of passage in everything, including cybersecurity. At Hackers-Arise, we believe in learning through experience, the kind that teaches you persistence and makes you a creative thinker.

If you’re ready for your competence to match your confidence you should start with our Cybersecurity Starter Bundle.

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