Security Staff Acquisition & Development

Many uncertainties await the world when the new United States administration takes office on January 20, 2017. The President-elect, while extremely vocal on the campaign trail, has been disconcertingly cagey in the weeks leading up to inauguration. 

The New Year is close upon us and many security firms and media outlets are busy publishing 2017 predictions or “the year in review.” Rather than following suit, we’d like to propose a New Year’s resolution to all security practitioners (and office workers, in general, really).

In security, where human resources are tight to begin with, thinking about where you’re going to find the best individuals to staff a threat intelligence team can quickly turn into a headache.

While security practitioners are thinking about exploits, vulnerabilities, controls, and threat actors’ TTPs, what executives really want to know is, “When the company is the victim of an attack, what effect will that have on the rest of the company, and how quickly can employees resume?"

“Security has a secret power: threat intelligence,” quipped Dave Ockwell-Jenner, Senior Manager, Security Threat & Operational Risk Management (STORM) at SITA, during MISTI’s recent Threat Intelligence Summit in New Orleans, Louisiana.

Indeed, effective, successful organizations are attempting to proactively identify threats and indicators of compromise before they present serious destruction to the victim organization. Even the most robust and mature threat intelligence programs, though, aren’t immune to a breach.

“Insider threat” — it’s a term that gets thrown around a lot in cybersecurity circles. Practitioners want to know who is responsible for attacks and how attacks are being perpetrated so defenses can be appropriately implemented and provisioned.