18/ THE CYBERSECURITY SKILLS GAP

By Clare Naden on 15 April 2021

Why education is our best weapon against cybercrime.

The Internet has been one of the biggest winners in the past year’s pandemic, with traffic and transactions reaching unprecedented levels in 2020. Unsurprisingly, the number of malicious attacks and activity has risen with it. According to INTERPOL Secretary-General Jürgen Stock, “cybercriminals are developing and boosting their attacks at an alarming pace, exploiting the fear and uncertainty caused by the unstable social and economic situation created by COVID-19”.

Coming at a time when estimates state that up to 3.5 million cybersecurity jobs will go unfilled this year, this is bad news. Are we losing the battle? Upskilling those already in the cybersecurity industry and enticing newcomers to join is our best defence, but programmes and schemes are piecemeal, and not enough.

We sat down with world-renowned IT security specialist Dr Edward Humphreys to discuss concerns about the cyber-skills shortage and its potential implications for business and society. Dr Humphreys sits on a number of committees run jointly by ISO and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC), including ISO/IEC JTC 1, Information technology, subcommittee SC 27, Information security, cybersecurity and privacy protection, which has over 200 published standards and a further 77 in development. An expert in his field, he is often quoted as the “father” of the ISO/IEC 27001 family of standards for information security management systems.

Source: iso.org