Mischel Kwon: Cybersecurity is a Group Effort
We have to start that early, which means we need to re-teach our teachers. And we need to look towards the providers, like the Internet providers, social networking providers, and the email providers, to help get the message out. We then need to continue to send messages that are important, like turning off your computer at night, patching your computer regularly, or not giving out personal information on email or on the web.
TNNI: What kind of things should both the government and private industry look to do to try to recruit and keep skilled cyber professionals?
Kwon: I am a Cyber Corps graduate, a program I very much believe in. I continue to work in that program today, teaching the Cyber Corps scholarship recipients at George Washington University. I believe scholarship programs to move some of our best and brightest into the security area, whether it is a profession or in the policy arena or in the technical arena, is critical and important. The Cyber Corps program has been extremely successful, and has brought a number of good talents to the government. It would be nice to see that program expanded, or other programs added to it, that not only focus on additions to the government but also have some private sector investments.
In addition to that, it is critical and important to retrain a lot of employees who are already in the government looking to go into the security realm. It is important to have not only security skills, but skills in working in the government. The model we have now in the government is very contractor heavy, so we need to think beyond just training the government sector folks to the private sector arm as well, which supports the government. We have to have a program that trains both ends of that pole to be successful. We also must look at career tracks in the government and make sure there are career tracks that match a more technical type of professional. If you look at the straight GS track, it really doesn’t accommodate a technical person moving up in the ranks. On the DoD side and the Intel community, they have different tracks that the more technical professionals can take without loosing their technical work. It might be nice for the civil side of the house to start looking at appropriate career tracks for technical cyber workers.
TNNI: Within the field of cybersecurity, what is the greatest concern to you and why?
Kwon: The greatest concern for me right now is that I am not sure that we are looking at this problem in the right place with the right tilt. There are a lot of people talking and commenting on the issue that do not have the technical knowledge or understanding of the real problem. Unfortunately, we are following louder voices, and louder voices that pay. We have to bring this back to the technical problem and try to solve the technical issue, and only then we can tackle all the political and policy issues. But we need the people who are talented in both areas solving the right problems.
Unfortunately, one of the things that we tend to do is gravitate towards the one-size fits all solution. We must remember that this is not just one problem; it is many problems on many different levels.
There are rudimentary, fundamental problems that we tend to gloss over and not talk about because they are not ‘sexy’. This is a hygiene issue. For instance, we are not patching our computers. It is difficult and cumbersome to get all of our computers patched, and it takes a lot of time and is very expensive. But that very hygiene problem is what is leaving us open for the majority of attacks that are happening today. Whether it’s in companies, whether it’s in the government, whether it’s home users – we are all suffering from this hygiene problem. To me, the biggest problem is we are not concentrating hard enough on fixing that hygiene problem, whether it is in the operating system, third-party software, on websites, or on the Internet infrastructure. We need to focus on fixing the fundamental problems, and then we can calm the noise down enough for us to move on to solving some of the bigger issues. I would like to see us focus back on something that is not so sexy.
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