According to the senior officials tasked with defending U.S. critical infrastructure says that the shortage of security experts and specialists in the U.S. is one of the primary intimidations to national cybersecurity.
Speaking at TechCrunch Disrupt SF, the Assistant Director for Cybersecurity, Jeanette Manfra, who is working for Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), stated that the agency was preparing new cybersecurity professionals precedence.
“It’s a national security danger that we don’t have the talent regardless of whether it’s in the government or the private area,” stated Manfra. “We have a huge shortage that is expected that will turn larger.” Homeland Security is already acknowledging, working on developing a curriculum for possible developers as soon as they hit the school system. “We spend a lot of time endowed in K-12 curriculum,” she stated.
The agency is also contemplating to take a page from the tech industry’s playbook and developing a new workforce training plan that’s modeled after how to recruit and retain individuals.
For Manfra, the technology community and the government agencies tasked with defending the nation’s critical assets must work more closely together, and the best method to do that is to encourage a revolving door between cybersecurity businesses and technology companies. That may boost the hackles of privacy experts and private companies, given the friction among what private organizations wish to protect and what governments wish were detected — through things like backdoors — but Manfra says close collaboration is important.
Manfra foresees that the government will pay for scholarships for cybersecurity specialists who will spend three to five years in government before jumping into the private sector. “It creates a community of people with shared knowledge [and] in the area of security, and we are all trying to do the same things,” she stated.
Priorities for Homeland Security are forcing down the cost of technologies so that the most defenceless institutions like municipalities, states, and townships or the private businesses that are tasked with supporting public infrastructure — that do not have the same money to pay like the federal government — can protect themselves.
