Comment on this storyCommentGift ArticleGood morning! Welcome to Tim Starks, who is joining The Cybersecurity 202 as its author. Tim graciously spent yesterday — his first day at The Washington Post! — helping me write this newsletter. You can send tips and congratulations to [email protected] talks cybersecurity jobs, recruitment strategy ahead of White House summitThe Biden administration is hosting a high-profile cybersecurity workforce summit at the White House today as workers continue to battle waves of threats in cyberspace. Cyber workforce challenges aren’t just an economic issue or national security issue, but a “national issue,” National Cyber Director Chris Inglis told The Cybersecurity 202 in an exclusive interview.The National Cyber Workforce and Education Summit is designed as an early step toward making progress on workforce issues, Inglis said.AdvertisementBut the summit is about more than just the need to fill cybersecurity jobs, he said. “It’s about creating an opportunity for a broader swath of people to take those jobs. It’s about making sure that every citizen has the skills necessary to take full advantage of … cyberspace,” Inglis said, calling it a “national issue.” “Our goal — first, middle and last — is to bring leaders from a very diverse kind of broad swath of the American system together to understand that, to commit to solving that and to put their efforts together so that we begin to make some progress broadly across that front,” Inglis said.The context: The summit comes amid years of concern that the United States doesn’t have enough cybersecurity professionals to fill thousands of important cybersecurity jobs. The good news: “We continue to fill cyber jobs at a constant rate” of about two-thirds, Inglis said.The bad news: “The denominator is going way up, so that last year it would have been [that] we’re 550,000 short; this year we’re 771,000 [short].”The agenda: The summit will consist of a plenary session and three breakout sessions, Inglis said. Those sessions will be focused on filling traditional IT and cybersecurity jobs, looking at disciplines that need to know more about cyber issues and ensuring that the broader American public has digital and cyber skills that are important to being successful in cyberspace, Inglis said.AdvertisementA host of employers, education leaders and federal agency heads are also expected to attend, including Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency Director Jen Easterly and Anne Neuberger, the deputy national security adviser for cyber and emerging technology.Both the private sector and government are facing cyber talent shortages. That presents a “stunningly important intersection,” Inglis said.“It turns out that no matter where you look — private sector, public sector — about one third of the jobs that have IT or cyber in their job title are unfilled,” Inglis said, calling the intersection a “common problem or a common opportunity.”But the “government’s not going to get healthy and well unless the larger nation gets healthy and well, and vice versa,” Inglis said.Inglis’s office is writing a strategy this fall, he said. The document is expected to address workforce issues, as Tim Starks reported for CyberScoop last week.Last month, the congressionally led Cyberspace Solarium Commission recommended that cybersecurity leaders develop a grouping of human resource specialists within the government to hire cyber pros. The commission also recommended getting more data about the government’s cybersecurity workforce and investing more money into recruiting and retaining cybersecurity professionals.Advertisement“We’re about two-thirds manned now,” the commission’s executive director, Mark Montgomery, told The Cybersecurity 202 at the time. “When you’re two-thirds manned, you clearly aren’t getting the job done. It can make for low morale. … You can end up with an underperforming, unhappy, undertrained workforce.”No need for a disinformation governance board, DHS advisers sayThe Department of Homeland Security’s advisers unanimously endorsed a recommendation urging the agency to scrap its controversial disinformation governance board, The Post’s Maria Sacchetti reports. The report comes two months after DHS announced that it was pausing the work of the board. “Officials said they created the board in April to fight disinformation-fueled extremism that might endanger national security, but Republicans and conservative media portrayed it as an Orwellian tool that could infringe on privacy and free speech,” Maria writes.AdvertisementHomeland Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said the board was created to combat disinformation-related security threats, with a focus on Russia and human smuggling. DHS later emphasized that the board didn’t have “any ope …
Analysis | Inglis talks cybersecurity jobs, recruitment strategy ahead of White House summit – The Washington Post
