Tag Archives: workforce

Army must empower next generation to succeed in cyber, senior official says

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For the armed forces to succeed in cyberspace, the military must avoid “groupthink” by exploring new approaches and empowering junior service members, a senior U.S. Army official says. To quickly develop the Army’s cyber capabilities requires that leadership consider unique options while also adjusting for a different culture brought in by recruits who are inherently digitally savvy, according to Col. Chris Wade, director of the Army’s Task Force Cyber Strong. The program is designed to quickly develop and improve the military’s ability to defend against and launch cyberattacks. “What we want to avoid in the Army is that ‘groupthink,’” Wade said Thursday at the Red Hat Government Symposium presented by FedScoop. “That’s challenging for us as leaders … we got to embrace what’s going on .. giving power to the lowest levels so that guys can think through problems and rapidly react.” Wade, who serves in the Army’s Office of the Deputy Chief […]

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When feds want to hire a cyber-ninja, time is more important than money

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The time it takes to actually onboard a new federal employee is a much more significant problem than pay and benefits when it comes to hiring top cybersecurity talent for U.S. agencies, former federal officials and private sector executives said Thursday. Conventional wisdom holds that federal government jobs can’t compete with the private sector on remuneration, but money generally is not the issue for highly skilled cybersecurity workers, panel members said at the Dell Technologies Digital Transformation Summit produced by FedScoop. “The challenge on the government side is time to hire,” said Karen Evans, a former senior technology official with the Office of Management and Budget under President George W. Bush and now the national director of the U.S. Cyber Challenge. It generally takes months — sometimes more than a year — to complete the background check and other bureaucratic procedures to start someone as a federal employee. And that, explained Evans, is more of a problem […]

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FBI’s recruitment strategy for cybersecurity pros starts early, focuses on high school

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The FBI’s longterm strategy for hiring proficient cybersecurity professionals involves reaching into high schools, helping foster STEM education and perhaps most importantly, encouraging students to enroll in Scholarship for Service programs that eventually guide them toward Quantico, said Howard Marshall, deputy assistant director of the bureau’s cybersecurity division. “[Cyber workforce recruitment] is a huge challenge for us, maybe one of our biggest,” Marshall said Wednesday at CyberTalks in Washington, D.C. “We have a significant portion of our agents and investigators that are not equipped, what you could probably call not tech-savvy, that are not going to be much help when it comes to the technical side of an investigation.” Marshall said the FBI currently has a nationwide pilot program in which agents are working to encourage the study and development of science, technology, engineering and mathematics courses in high school. The idea is to get students engaged in exercises and other activities that […]

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Young Israelis increasingly opt for cyber service and contribute to combat troop shortage

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The Israeli military’s cyber units have a reputation as some of the world’s most effective. All of a sudden, that’s a problem. A reported shortage of combat troops is being exacerbated by Israeli draftees opting more and more for the IDF’s cybersecurity efforts instead of combat roles, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported on Friday. The IDF’s cyber roles are safe, prestigious postings that have been boosted by a deliberate and long-running public relations campaign from the government. “The IDF may need many more cyberexperts, but not in the numbers that the education system producing,” a senior officer in the Manpower Directorate told Haaretz. “We don’t need so many mathematicians and not every one of them has the characteristics that meet the needs of the intelligence branch, which often looks for other personal characteristics among the draftees for its units. Israeli society is struggling to accept this, and the army is portrayed as being deaf, […]

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Citing ‘confidence gap’ in American tech workforce, CompTIA creates professional association

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A leading association of technology companies, citing the looming workforce crisis in cybersecurity and other IT fields, announced Tuesday it was re-launching a professional organization that would represent and offer certifications to those seeking employment in the sector. The Computing Technology Industry Association, known as CompTIA, formally rolled out its new workforce program — the Association of Information Technology Professionals or AITP, in a press release after months of preparation. There are projected to be 1.8 million unfilled job vacancies in the tech industry by 2024, CompTIA says. That skills gap, the release says, is “also a confidence gap — where many don’t think they have the background or support to be part of the technology industry.” AITP launches with chapters in 20 states, and plans to open more, according to the release. Membership is free for students, $99 a year for professionals and $249 for recruiters. The association says it will offer members a menu of […]

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U.S. government’s cyber Scholarship-for-Service program would expand under Senate bill

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Legislation advancing in the Senate would expand a National Science Foundation scholarship program that funds cybersecurity education for students who commit to government service after they obtain their degree. The Cyber Scholarship Opportunities Act would expand the NSF’s CyberCorps: Scholarship-for-Service program, which awards grants and scholarships to students in exchange for agreeing to take on cybersecurity jobs in federal or state and local government after they graduate. The proposal, S. 754, which was marked up and approved unanimously Wednesday by the Senate Commerce, Science and Technology Committee, would expand the parameters of the SfS program so that it can include students studying part-time or in two year courses at community college. It also would mandate a series of pilots at community colleges around the country, including for military veterans. Workforce experts predict a growing “skills gap” in the cybersecurity workforce, especially for the government, which cannot easily hike its wages. Policy initiatives like the CyberCorps SfS […]

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Recruitment and retention of ‘cyber ninjas’ doesn’t have to be a dark art, report says

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Those on the front lines of the cybersecurity workforce crisis are dogged by one question above all others: how to recruit and retain the highly technically skilled personnel they need. Now, thanks to the SANS Institute, they have some fresh answers — at least in the government contracting sector. The institute, an information-security training provider and research clearinghouse, analyzed a list of the top 100 U.S. government contractors, and identified the eight companies which score highest on two indices reflecting metrics developed by the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank last year. The eight firms are all major U.S. defense and intelligence  contractors, called systems integrators because they build IT and other business systems for the government by assembling hardware, software and services from multiple vendors. According to the SANS analysis, the eight companies have had “remarkable success” in recruiting and retaining the highly technically skilled individuals that the CSIS report dubbed “cyber […]

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Federal report: Hospital cybersecurity is in ‘critical condition’

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Many American hospitals and health care practices are critically vulnerable to cyberattack and lack the resources to protect against rising threats, according to a long-awaited report issued by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Service’s Health Care Industry Cybersecurity Task Force. The starkly negative report points to problems beyond hardware and software. The task force, established a year go, is made up of 21 security experts, health care professionals and government officials. “Many organizations cannot afford to retain in-house information security personnel, or designate an information technology (IT) staff member with cybersecurity as a collateral duty,” the task force reported. “These organizations often lack the infrastructure to identify and track threats, the capacity to analyze and translate the threat data they receive into actionable information, and the capability to act on that information.” The talent shortage that hampers cybersecurity in all sectors hits health care especially hard so that the industry leans especially hard on part-time positions or […]

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(ISC)² survey: To recruit cyber talent, feds must make up in training, benefits, what jobs lack in pay

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Federal agencies pay an average of $7,000 a year less to cybersecurity personnel than their private sector counterparts, so they need to offer training and other benefits while recruiting more from overlooked groups like women and minorities, according to one of the largest regular surveys of information security workers. The eighth biannual Global Information Security Workforce Study, done by the Center for Cyber Safety and Education and sponsored by contracting giant Booz Allen Hamilton, cyber recruiters Alta Associates and the International Information Systems Security Certification Consortium or (ISC)², was unveiled Tuesday at (ISC)²’s conference CyberSecureGov in Washington, D.C. The U.S. government “must enhance its benefits … to attract future hires and retain existing personnel given its fierce competition with the private sector for skilled workers and the unprecedented demand,” said Dan Waddell, (ISC)² managing director, North America. “Unfortunately,” he added, “the layers of complexity involved in fulfilling that goal are significant.” “Thanks to the record-number of federal GISWS […]

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University of Maryland, Baltimore County wins national cybersecurity championships

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The University of Maryland, Baltimore County won the 2017 National Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition over the weekend, beating out nine other teams in the final round from universities based across the country, including the renown Rochester Institute of Technology. Students competed against one another last week in San Antonio, Texas, in a constructed digital battlefield where each team was scored on their ability to defend a network infrastructure that was designed to mirror systems currently used in the commercial sector. Competitors were tasked with guarding the model network, which included point-of-sale and inventory technologies, while ensuring that it remained useable and reliable for end users. An in-house red team of ethical hackers employed by the event’s sponsors played the part of attacker, launching a range of different cyberattacks at the students. Over the last several years, a series of separate challenges have also been added to the competition to specifically […]

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