What does the Cyber Security industry need?

Another week, more headlines and more to worry about; isn’t it fun being up-to-date with Cyber Security news? Sometimes I think it would be better to be an Ostrich, enjoying the feeling of sand around your head as the world passes you by… We’ve got Trump in power (dum dum daaahh!), companies in the Silicon Valley are planning to move their servers away from American soil and there’s rumours of Rudy Giuliani becoming America’s solution for Cyber Security. Well I’m going to focus away from the current issues (mainly because I might rant too much!) and highlight something which marries up recruitment and Cyber Security.

DarkReading.com have released an article on the “8 Hot Skills Sought by IT Security Departments” (https://goo.gl/Mr1qM7) and I thought it would be quite good to highlight these and see if there’s anything else that we should be looking at.

As mentioned in every article I’ve read today, companies need to assess their security, make sure their defences are up-to-date, and to try to resist any sort of breach as much as possible. In order to do this (according to DarkReading) you need to have the following skillsets within your IT Security department; Troubleshooting, Innate Curiosity, Knowledge of the latest attack trends, Knowledge of the latest vulnerabilities, Incident Response, Data Analysis and Visualisation, Philosophy of Servitude and Communication.

So how do companies get these skillsets? What’s the best route? To me, it’s a mix between the technical and the decision makers. You need the technical people of the world to sort out the troubleshooting and the incident response. You need the board members to implement the strategies and to encourage the communication between the departments. Let’s use a reference that I may have used a couple of times… The Death Star wasn’t built by one person was it? Emperor Palpatine had a vision, he “hired” people (or forced, however you want to look at it because I’m pretty sure he didn’t offer salaries!) to implement his plans, the technical built the components and then ta-daa, the Death Star was built. In my opinion, we need to get more security focussed people in the board room and then it will all trickle down from there.