Employers and educators are rethinking the way they attract and train potential employees to meet the demands of an increasingly vulnerable online world.
“It’s scary. Our power grid, our cars, our everyday devices — basically everything is online and able to be attacked,” said Georgia Weidman, author of “Penetration Testing: A Hands-On Introduction to Hacking.” Weidman is the founder of two cybersecurity companies, Bulb Security, where she is chief executive, and Shevirah, where she is chief technology officer. Shevirah specializes in security for mobile devices.
“It would certainly cause mass destruction if our power grid went down or our water pumps started going haywire or our dams decided to open all their sluices,” she said. “That’s actually something that could happen.”
According to a report released this year by the Identity Theft Resource Center, the number of data breaches tracked in the United States in 2017 hit a high of more than 1,500, up almost 45 percent over 2016. In one incident this year, the data of 29 million Facebook users was stolen.
In response to the sheer number of new digital gates that might be left open, employers and educators have had to become more creative in finding people to guard them.
They need penetration testers to simulate attacks to find and fix vulnerabilities that could be exploited by a real attacker.
They need malware analysts to find out what malicious programs do so they can protect from the attacks.
They need security researchers to discover new vulnerabilities in applications and other products — before the thieves do — so they can be fixed. They need security architects to make sure all the best practices are being followed.
According to the chief economist for LinkedIn, Guy Berger, there was a shortage as of September of 11,000 people with cybersecurity skills in the San Francisco Bay Area, 5,000 in New York and almost 4,000 in Seattle, the areas with the largest concentration of need. LinkedIn regularly issues workforce reports based on its analysis of jobs data in the United States.
Some major corporations have openly taken to hiring hackers to help protect them. An extreme example is Kevin Mitnick, who hacked into corporations, landed on the FBI Most Wanted Fugitives list and went to jail for five years, but is now a security consultant to Fortune 500 companies and governments. As he says on his website about hackers, “It takes one to know one.”
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Source: The Seattle Times
