Dark Reading is part of the Informa Tech Division of Informa PLC

This site is operated by a business or businesses owned by Informa PLC and all copyright resides with them.Informa PLC's registered office is 5 Howick Place, London SW1P 1WG. Registered in England and Wales. Number 8860726.

Database Security
Authentication
Mobile
Privacy
Compliance
Careers and People
Identity & Access Management
Security Monitoring
Advanced Threats
Insider Threats
Vulnerability Management
Comments
Black Hat to Host Discussion on Diversity
Newest First  |  Oldest First  |  Threaded View
raceBannon9901
50%
50%
raceBannon9901,
 User Rank: Apprentice
7/19/2017 | 8:27:03 AM
Re: Ridiculous article, ridiculous symposium
I agree with Kelly. The network defender community has known about this for almost a decade.

 

CSO Magazine said this year that worldwide, there are 1 Million unfilled jobs. When you consider women in the network defender community, we find that they are almost non-existent. Forbes said last year that women make up only 11% of the cybersecurity workforce. If you add a minority to that checklist, say a black or Hispanic woman, that number drops to under 1%.

 

Clearly, if we are to close the gap, women and minorities have to be a source.

 

And we just can't tell our HR departments to hire more. Facebook, Google and others have all tried and failed.

 

Part of problem is that many women and minorities lose interest in STEM (Science, technology, engineering and math) subjects before they get to college. There are many reasons for this that have been well documented: male dominated culture turns women off, popular culture pushes women into "traditional" women's roles, minorities do not have access to strong STEM education, and others.

 

Another part of the problem stems from the cybersecurity old guard (Old white guys). We are the ones doing the hiring. We are the ones that tolerate sexism in the workplace when what we should be doing is stamping it out at every opportunity. We are the ones that are not mentoring the few minorities that do work for us and knocking down the obstacles that prevent them from succeeding.

 

This is the message that the network defender community should be hearing; especially from the old guard. Presenting that information at one of the most well-attended network defender conferences on the planet is a good place to do it.

 

Very respectfully, 

 

 

Rick Howard

CSO

Palo Alto Networks

Full Disclosure: I am on Kelly's panel at Blackhat.
decornel
50%
50%
decornel,
 User Rank: Apprentice
7/18/2017 | 3:50:52 PM
You can not force the horse
This is the same problem in Electrical Engineering.  It's not what people want to do.  This has very little to do with minorities, but this has to do with society.  People want to do what is fun.  In Cyber Security everyone wants to do the cool jobs like research, pen testing, but the industry needs practitioners.  It's not fun, IT IS WORK!!!

So we have what people want which is the people who gravitate to Cyber Security are the people who want to do real Cyber Security WORK!!!

What we need is to make Cyber Security a YouTube channel and everyone would want to do it.  Well, until they have to actually be accountable for parsing the 10's of millions of logs, firewall rules, filters, scripts, and reports that they must do to be a real Cyber Security Engineer.  It takes time to learn to be good, which probably means you had to work real hard for a long time to obtain the skills needed to do the job.

Cyber Security, it's a hot high paying job, because no one wants to do it!  Essentially Cyber Security is the new Garbage collector job; they pay high to lure talented people to do a thankless job that is needed by everyone.

Agree or disagree, but this is not a diversity thing.
Kelly Jackson Higgins
50%
50%
Kelly Jackson Higgins,
 User Rank: Strategist
7/18/2017 | 9:15:34 AM
Re: Ridiculous article, ridiculous symposium
I'm not sure what you mean by "ridiculous." It's a problem when an industry has such dire needs for talent and is missing entire sectors of society. 

And regarding your comment about "college majors that cater to identity politics instead of practical insdustrial demands," there are plenty of non-technical skills also needed in security.

 
ERechts
100%
0%
ERechts,
 User Rank: Apprentice
7/17/2017 | 12:18:44 PM
Ridiculous article, ridiculous symposium
So the newest and fastest moving growth industry in tech lacks proportional minority involvement, and this constitutes a crisis?

I'm impressed by how quickly someone found a profitable career raising "awareness" of the resultant trend of useless college majors that cater to identity politics instead of practical insdustrial demands
KlatnuV505
100%
0%
KlatnuV505,
 User Rank: Apprentice
7/14/2017 | 5:55:00 PM
Missing something
I am somehow missing how this is different from any other employee.  Every employee requires certain things beyond a pay envelope.  


Edge-DRsplash-10-edge-articles
I Smell a RAT! New Cybersecurity Threats for the Crypto Industry
David Trepp, Partner, IT Assurance with accounting and advisory firm BPM LLP,  7/9/2021
News
Attacks on Kaseya Servers Led to Ransomware in Less Than 2 Hours
Robert Lemos, Contributing Writer,  7/7/2021
Commentary
It's in the Game (but It Shouldn't Be)
Tal Memran, Cybersecurity Expert, CYE,  7/9/2021
Register for Dark Reading Newsletters
White Papers
Video
Cartoon
Current Issue
How Enterprises are Attacking the Cybersecurity Problem
Concerns over supply chain vulnerabilities and attack visibility drove some significant changes in enterprise cybersecurity strategies over the past year. Dark Reading's 2021 Strategic Security Survey showed that many organizations are staying the course regarding the use of a mix of attack prevention and threat detection technologies and practices for dealing with cyber threats.
Flash Poll
Twitter Feed
Dark Reading - Bug Report
Bug Report
Enterprise Vulnerabilities
From DHS/US-CERT's National Vulnerability Database
CVE-2021-40526
PUBLISHED: 2021-10-25
Incorrect calculation of buffer size vulnerability in Peleton TTR01 up to and including PTV55G allows a remote attacker to trigger a Denial of Service attack through the GymKit daemon process by exploiting a heap overflow in the network server handling the Apple GymKit communication. This can lead t...
CVE-2021-40527
PUBLISHED: 2021-10-25
Exposure of senstive information to an unauthorised actor in the "com.onepeloton.erlich" mobile application up to and including version 1.7.22 allows a remote attacker to access developer files stored in an AWS S3 bucket, by reading credentials stored in plain text within the mobile applic...
CVE-2021-40371
PUBLISHED: 2021-10-25
Gridpro Request Management for Windows Azure Pack before 2.0.7912 allows Directory Traversal for remote code execution, as demonstrated by ..\\ in a scriptName JSON value to ServiceManagerTenant/GetVisibilityMap.
CVE-2021-21703
PUBLISHED: 2021-10-25
In PHP versions 7.3.x up to and including 7.3.31, 7.4.x below 7.4.25 and 8.0.x below 8.0.12, when running PHP FPM SAPI with main FPM daemon process running as root and child worker processes running as lower-privileged users, it is possible for the child processes to access memory shared with the ma...
CVE-2021-42258
PUBLISHED: 2021-10-22
BQE BillQuick Web Suite 2018 through 2021 before 22.0.9.1 allows SQL injection for unauthenticated remote code execution, as exploited in the wild in October 2021 for ransomware installation. SQL injection can, for example, use the txtID (aka username) parameter. Successful exploitation can include ...