Become a cyber security expert

Cyber-security work is *creative* work.  Though much of it is done by rote (the same old vulnerability scans, the same old firewall configurations, etc.), the real intellectual "jewels" are finding the application-coding flaw the designer didn't think of (buffer-overflow, off-by-one error, fuzzing), or using existing communication channels in previously-unexpected ways (making outbound DNS queries which happen to look like 16-digit credit card numbers, using patterns of ICMP ping-traffic as Morse Code, etc.).

So:  you need to familiarize yourself with the tricks of the trade.  I would grab a couple of O'Reilly books (PGP Encryption, RADIUS, Security Warrior, SSH are good choices).  If those are too difficult for a first read, fall back to Wikipedia or Hacking for Dummies.  (Yes, I have a copy on my Drive.)  If you are comfortable with three or four of the references above, move on to anything by Bruce Schneier, or try watching/listening to Marcus Ranum lectures.  This is the time when you will start to drown in Microsoft-Sucks or Such-and-Such-Vendor-Sucks chatter.  I have little patience for this myself.  Refrain if you can.

Since reading by itself can be boring, download some free security tools -- NMAP, Nessus, Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer, NetStumbler, Kismet, WireShark -- and run them (on your own/approved systems only), and read through their outputs until you can understand 60% of the content.  If you are familiar with two or more programming languages, download OWASP LAPSE+ (a code security scanner), and try running it on some of your source-code, and see if the results make any sense to you.  If you are familiar with HTTP/CGI request syntax, download Burp Proxy or Zed Attack Proxy (or Achilles, or Paros) and experiment with "freezing" a Web request in mid-flight, then illicitly modifying its contents, before letting it fly to its intended server destination.  On behalf of all security professionals, I want to impress upon you that scanning/probing other people's computer systems w/o permission could get you reprimanded, suspended, or criminally prosecuted.  It's not difficult to set up a VirtualBox environment if you want practice-targets.

If you are starting to gain comfort with the mechanics of "computer networking" and "computer configuration" (no one expects you to master this within a single year, or even a single decade), move on to specific exploit scenarios.  Read up on how the SSH off-by-one vulnerability worked, and during what years/versions it was vulnerable.  Do research into the Teardrop Attack and/or Ping of Death exploits.  Learn and memorize what a "shopping cart attack" is, and why it's bad, and how to protect against it.  (This was a common interview question in the 2000s.)  

Once you have a flavor for those real-world attack scenarios, dig into the modern-day stuff:  HeartBleed, ShellShock, Poodle.  Start thinking about which of those three is 'worst,' and how you might determine whether vulnerable systems might still exist on the Internet, and -- most importantly -- if your system was once vulnerable to these attacks, but has since been fixed/patched, can it truly be trusted now?  (What could have happened to it during that earlier unpatched timeframe?)

Though the self-driven learning activities above will give you practical familiarity and command of buzzword parlance, they are not a substitute for formal classical computer-science and/or computer-engineering education.  Grasping and comprehending such academic topics as the shell-interpreter, the ready-run-zombie process model, and/or the global (variable) environmental model are *crucial* to that look-at-things-in-a-new-way 'creative' approach I discuss(ed) above.

Best of luck to you during this process.  Keep in mind it's possible to be 'good enough' without being 'the best' -- you will be awe-struck by some of the prominent luminaries in this field.  Except for that Vendor-Sucks thing.