Episode 17: Personnel Security

Ever apply for a cybersecurity job and then either in the listing or partway through the interview you realize, “Yikes, this job is not for me.”

In 2010, the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) published the report “A Human Capital Crisis in Cybersecurity,” which noted “there are about 1,000 security people in the US who have the specialized security skills to operate effectively in cyberspace. We need 10,000 to 30,000.” Twelve years later, the Cyberspace Solarium Commission 2.0 Workforce Development Agenda for the National Cyber Director observed that “in the United States, there are almost 600,000 open cybersecurity jobs across the private sector and federal, state, and local governments — a remarkable gap considering that the field currently employs just over a million professionals.” This is not an encouraging trend.

“Businesses and organizations would need to … educate their workforce on how to validate that a certificate was correct,” he says. “And there would need to be a substantial educational investment to combat the inevitable phishing campaigns that’d spring up, such as fake websites to collect personally identifiable information and fake security alerts associated with these digital certificates.”

“Where cloud analytics shine is in detecting a repeated series of risky actions by an individual user account [that signal] a business email compromise followed by a ransomware attack,” he said. “Cloud analytics allow organizations to detect and prevent these and other attacks not only at scale but also faster than traditional investigative techniques.”

“We talk about ‘data breaches’ because of regulatory and statutory definitions that focus on the disclosure of data. An organization’s security strategy should work with the end in mind and focus heavily on denying threat actors access to those data with the highest regulatory, statutory, or contractual risks.” Kayne McGladrey, Field CISO at Hyperproof

Companies should pay special attention to consistent classification and labeling of data, as it’s one of the biggest hurdles to effective data governance. Setting default labels for new data (for example, dubbing them confidential) can ensure that policies and technical controls are applied consistently across the organization. This also frees up data creators from having to manually label all newly created information. “In that way, a data steward only needs to review data labels when that data is crossing a security barrier such as preparing a file to send to a client or third-party vendor,” notes Kayne McGladrey (@kaynemcgladrey), director of security and information technology at Pensar Development.