As you walked into SecureWorld Denver, you may have found yourself face to face with a giant blue bear looking down through the conference center glass walls. While I could make a cheesy metaphor about the 40-foot bear being like the current threat landscape that's looming over our heads, I'll just point out instead that he was kind of cute.
But in all seriousness, there are numerous cyber threats weighing down the Internet at any given moment, and security professionals gathered at the Denver conference to share insights and best practices on how we can more effectively secure the cybersphere together.
"Cybersecurity is a team sport," Daniel Likarish, Director of the CIAS, pointed out during his 11:15 session on Colorado's multi-agency incident response plan. He encouraged self-study, collaboration, and personal reflection as means to establish transitive trust and implement self-organized leadership.
Col. Cedric Leighton, Military Analyst for CNN, advocates for a more effective partnership between the public and private sectors of cybersecurity. During his keynote speech on day two, he explained how, "we really need the right policy prescription that emanates from each of the three branches of government." However, the government needs to work together with businesses and individuals alike to form an alliance against emerging cyber threats. After all, the number of internet devices already exceeds the human population, and five billion people will soon be connected to the internet.
If a coordinated industry attack occurred, it would have, "the potential to take us back to the 18th century in terms of our personal life," Leighton explained. It's not just the government or large corporations that need to work on preventing attack; it's all of us.
But with hundreds of thousands on unfilled cybersecurity positions across the globe, how are we supposed to make strides in better security? Jessica Raymond, IT Security Manager for Weld County Government, explains how only 11% of information security positions are filled by women - a number that hasn't changed since 2013. "If [cyber attack] is one of the biggest threats were facing and we're hugely understaffed, that's a problem," she explained. There are already 209,000 open jobs in the cyber sector, and that number is expected to grow by 1,500,000 by 2019, according to research by Forbes. Having more opportunities for women in the field can greatly decrease this gap.
As keynote speaker Jerry Skurla, of Arbor Networks, put it, "technology by itself will not win." The human element of cybersecurity may sometimes get a bad rap, but it's crucial if we hope to better secure our networks and our industries - something that Denver speakers all agreed on.
