Christian Wiens is Director of Marketing at MixMode. He has 10+ years of experience as a cybersecurity professional. He has his BA from The University of California, Berkeley and resides in Austin, TX.
October is recognized every year as Cyber Security Awareness Month (CSAM). Starting in 2004, this important awareness month has been a collaboration between The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and the National Cybersecurity Alliance (NCA) to lead a collaborative effort between government and industry to raise cybersecurity awareness nationally and internationally.
This year, the theme – “See Yourself in Cyber” – focuses on the “people” part of cybersecurity. CISA and NCA are providing information and resources to help educate partners and the public, ensuring all individuals and organizations make smart decisions whether on the job, at home or at school – now and in the future.
CISA shares 3 ways you can take action and participate in this year’s campaign:
- See yourself taking action to stay safe online: For individuals and families this means updating your software, thinking before you click, having good strong passwords or a password keeper, and enabling multi-factor authentication on all sensitive accounts.
- See Yourself joining the cyber workforce: This is for those that are thinking about a career change or becoming a part of the cyber community. CISA is working with cyber leaders across the country to build a cybersecurity workforce that is bigger, more diverse and dedicated to solving the problems that will help keep the American people safe.
- See Yourself as part of the solution: For cyber industry partners, CISA encourages better collaboration between organizations to share real-time information, reduce risk and build resilience to protect America’s critical infrastructure.
Self-Learning AI Helps to Bridge the Cyber Workforce Gap
Large enterprises and U.S. municipalities face a massive shortage of cybersecurity professionals. The number of unfilled cybersecurity jobs worldwide grew 350% between 2013 and 2021, from 1 million to 3.5 million, according to Cybersecurity Ventures.
This gap represents a fundamental challenge in cyber workforce challenges: the intersection between human operation and technology. Do humans enhance technology, or is human input holding SOCs back from using modern technology to its full potential? Can today’s technology (legacy tool stacks including SIEM, NDR, and NTA) even deliver on vendor promises in a typical SOC environment?
These questions can be answered partially by the data we gathered in our State of InfoSec Q3 2022 survey where we found that the 2 largest hiring priorities for CISOs are senior cybersecurity professionals and AI / ML engineers. AI is becoming front and center for the Security Operations Center to help manage the shortage of cyber professionals.
The human-technology divide is impacting SOC effectiveness against network security threats. 80% of successful cyber attacks are novel, zero-day attacks that go unnoticed for months as a result of legacy, rules-based platform inefficiencies. MixMode takes a no-rules (self-learning AI) approach to helping SOC teams perform more effectively with less resources (i.e. people).
In an effort to “see ourselves as part of the solution” we recently shared 2 case studies in which MixMode was able to help important infrastructure organizations cut their cyber tool footprint in half, gain visibility into advanced adversary attacks, and greatly improve SOC productivity. You can download them here:
How a Major US City Rapidly Modernized it’s Cybersecurity
Self-Learning Cyber Defense for Financial Services
Additionally, here are a few more resources and articles that address the challenges that SOCs are facing across the country and how you, as a cybersecurity professional, can consider new solutions, make smarter decisions, and raise cybersecurity awareness: