Opening position The Mastercard cybersecurity job simulation on Forage is marketed as a career-exploration exercise. That framing is wrong. The tasks in it - phishing triage, vulnerability identification, and security awareness program design - are compressed versions of the exact work that production SOC, GRC, and awareness teams fail at every week. I have run these scenarios on live engagements, from the attacker side. The simulation is not a junior warm-up. It is a rehearsal of attack surface that most defenders treat as solved and most red teams still clear in under a day. What this program actually does is expose the gap between how defenders describe their work and how that work behaves under contact. Someone new to the field walks through it and thinks they are learning the basics. Someone who runs red team operations reads the same material and sees a map of the controls that routinely break in production. The scenarios are simplified, but the failure modes they model are not.…