Collaborate Disseminate
A blended workforce consisting of external organizations, traditional workers and non-traditional workers such as freelancers, remote workers, temporary workers and independent contractors (ICs) can provide an organization with the added potential for… Continue reading Security Considerations for a Blended Workforce
Coronavirus-related school closures are skyrocketing, leaving parents scrambling to educate their children while still juggling their jobs. It’s a challenging and confusing time — and Jonathan Slater and Lorna Armitage think they have something that might hold kids’ interest: a free online learning platform that teaches them about cybersecurity. The virtual “Cyber School,” slated to launch next Monday, plans to host daily 45-minute livestreams focused on topics including an introduction to coding and algorithms, online safety, ethical hacking and social engineering. Armitage and Slater are part of a growing cohort of cybersecurity professionals who, in addition to their day jobs, are volunteering to share their cybersecurity expertise during the coronavirus pandemic. “What can we do to help and care? Kids are going to be out of school, why don’t we try to put something together and get them interested in computer science and cybersecurity and tech in general?” Armitage, a […]
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Beyond the spotlight of the cybersecurity industry’s IPO-fueled paydays and reputation-making research lives the slow burn of daily anxiety. In just about every industry, mental health is overlooked and under-appreciated. But in cybersecurity, “it’s even more stigmatized,” according to psychiatrist Ryan Louie. “Nobody wants their security clearances or career advancements somehow impacted because of perceptions about mental health,” he told CyberScoop. And so Louie, who works at a 30-bed psychiatric ward in San Francisco, took to the 2020 RSA Conference, one of the biggest cybersecurity conferences in the world, to start a conversation about mental health. “We want to get more people [from] all different industries to start thinking about this,” Louie said after his presentation at the conference on Friday. Alert and bespectacled on stage, Louie explained why, as a psychiatrist who treats patients of all stripes, he became interested in cybersecurity. “Fundamentally, I’ve always felt that the most […]
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A contractor who has been working at the National Security Agency since 2017 has been charged with five counts of falsifying her timesheet, according to an indictment filed in the U.S. District Court of Maryland. The contractor, Melissa Heyer, allegedly filed hours claiming to have been working in a sensitive compartmented information facility (SCIF), meant to function as a highly classified work environment, when she was actually elsewhere. She allegedly filed these false claims on five separate occasions between May 2017 and July 2018. The false work Heyer claimed to have completed amounted to the government paying her and her company $100,000 in all, the indictment claims. The wages she falsely claimed to have earned amount to more than $7,000, according to the indictment. It wasn’t immediately clear if Heyer had admitted to the allegations in a review of her activity, or whether she denied or sought to cover it […]
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Cyber Command has recently cut down the average amount of time it takes to hire someone by approximately 40 percent — 111 days to 44 days — under the Cyber Excepted Service program, according to the Department of Defense CISO Jack Wilmer. The CES program, intended to speed up cybersecurity candidate recruitment in the DOD through initiatives like allowing hiring managers to make direct hires, was originally authorized in 2016 by Congress. The CES also establishes market-based pay scales and allows hiring with or without public notification or vacancy announcements, both intended to decrease red tape in the Pentagons’ hiring process. Wilmer said the decrease has given the Department of Defense a leg up on private sector cybersecurity hiring. Since implementing the CES program, the Pentagon has seen fewer cases of candidates leaving DOD jobs on the table for the private sector. “That is a huge win,” Wilmer said while speaking Thursday at the 2019 Workforce […]
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The HACKED Act is actually about making sure people don’t get hacked. The bipartisan bill — with the full title “The Harvesting American Cybersecurity Knowledge through Education Act” — was introduced Tuesday by four senators who say it would boost cybersecurity education and expand workforce training. The legislation comes as the Trump administration, Congress and industry have all taken steps to boost the cybersecurity workforce through training, recruitment and retention. “America is facing serious cyberthreats every day in today’s increasingly connected world, yet there is a serious shortage of workers needed to confront this urgent challenge,” Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., one of the cosponsors and the Commerce Committee’s ranking member, said in a statement. “The bipartisan HACKED Act of 2019 would help address this by training cybersecurity educators and skilling American workers to do these jobs, as well as increasing coordination on these issues throughout the government.” The bill includes proposals to incentivize recruitment of […]
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Fifteen major companies, including the Apple, Facebook, Google, IBM, and PwC, announced Wednesday they are joining together to change their cybersecurity job descriptions and requirements to attract more talent to the 3 million cybersecurity job openings that are expected to be available over the next two years. Specifically, the companies — which are part of the Aspen Cybersecurity Group — are focused on nixing requirements that candidates have four-year bachelor’s degrees and gender-biased job descriptions. “A bachelors degree is actually not a good proxy for whether you have the talent,” Chair of the Aspen Institute’s Cyber & Technology Program John Carlin told CyberScoop. “There’s plenty of talented people out there but we need to figure out better ways to identify them and train them.” The group, which also includes AIG, Cloudflare, the Cyber Threat Alliance, Duke Energy, IronNet, Johnson & Johnson, Northrop Grumman, Symantec, Unisys, and Verizon, came together over […]
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Federal Chief Information Officer Suzette Kent says she expects the government’s Cybersecurity Reskilling Academies to keep expanding over the next few years. As part of the Federal Chief Information Officer Council’s work to bolster the federal cyber workforce, the government has gone through two rounds of academies since last year. The first cohort had over 1,500 applications for just 25 slots. Counting the second round of applications, the academies have had more than 2,300 federal employees apply in all, Kent said at a Department of Homeland Security cybersecurity conference Wednesday. “That says something about the level of interest across the federal government,” Kent said. She added that agency feedback has been key to improving the federal cybersecurity workforce, with the administration focused on improving the skill level inside those agencies, particularly in those who primarily work outside of the tech sector. It’s “not to improve just our technology workforce, but our […]
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Anyone who is interested in cybersecurity law and policy can now take an online course that was partly shaped by National Security Agency. The course, which can be accessed through Penn State University’s Clark Center, touches on international and domestic cybersecurity law, cyber risk and technical details like how smartphones function, according to Anne McKenna, a Penn State professor who organized the course. James Houck, director of Penn State’s Center for Security Research and Education, told CyberScoop that program will serve as a primer to the legal and technical details of offensive and defensive cyber-operations. “What we’re trying to do … is create a framework for people who are trying to be introduced to cyber law, to offensive, defensive cyber operations, and for them to learn the fundamentals, the framework — and in our case legal authorities for how these work,” Houck said. Houck clarified that although the NSA put out […]
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U.S. Army Cyber Command could soon have a new identity. Commander Lt. Gen. Stephen Fogarty said this week he wants his military outfit, dedicated to electronic warfare and information operations, to be renamed as the “Army Information Warfare Command.” The rechristening would better represent a new military mission, he said, and come at a time when Army cyber personnel increasingly deal with troll farms on social media, disrupt ISIS operations, and work to confuse international adversaries’ understanding of U.S. military units’ location. “The intent is to provide a proposal that will change us from Army Cyber Command to Army Information Warfare Command because we believe that is a more accurate descriptor of what I am being asked to do on a daily basis,” Fogarty said at the AFCEA TechNet conference in Augusta, Georgia this week. But this change, which Fogarty said he intends to push internally at the Department of Defense over the next two months, is more than just a new […]
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