After they entered, they may have left all the other windows and doors open Before working in cyber-security, I once worked at a company, when I was approached to look at another staff member’s email account which was “acting a bit funny”. When I looked, I found the sent mailbox was filling every 5 seconds with a new sent email, each to a seemingly random recipient, each purporting to be able to help the recipients “Meet girls” or “enlarge” one’s whatnot.

If you want to become a digital forensic expert, be aware that when entering the field, you will be presented with an abundance of information that you will not know. It is a wonderfully challenging career path. Some believe that having the title of a cybersecurity professional (e.g. digital forensics expert, cybersecurity analyst, incident response commander, etc.) means that this is an area where the field of knowledge is intimidating because it’s so expansive.

One thing I have noticed is that each industry comes up with their own terms and acronyms. Unfortunately, these inventions often vary depending on the person you speak to due to a lack of a governing body that decides on an exact definition. At times, acronyms can even overlap, causing further confusion. Therefore, when it comes to definitions, I always look to ask a variety of persons from across industries on how they would define certain terms.

A selection of this week’s more interesting vulnerability disclosures and cyber security news. For a daily selection see our twitter feed at #ionCube24. Extortion methods have been pretty consistent the past couple of years, but a new one popped up this week which seems to be focused on the online small business owner. I wonder how this one will pan out.

In advance of the RSA Conference 2020, we wanted to get a pulse of attendees’ perceptions on a few topics, specifically challenges facing modern SOCs (security operations centers) and the value they are getting from technologies such as analytics, automation, and their SIEM tools. To get this, we fielded a series of questions to the Twitter-verse and received nearly 17,000 votes! After going through the results, we found a few interesting things…

Mainstream media coverage of hacking often perpetuates the stereotype of hoodie-wearing hackers up to no good. For this reason, some people remain sceptical about hacking, even if it is in relation to ethical hacking undertaken by cyber security professionals.

Workforce management, often shortened to simply WFM, is about managing staff schedules and services within companies. Workforce management software incorporates most software that focuses on managing and simplifying the process of scheduling staff work hours as well as managing their work and productivity. Managing large amounts of staff members turns into a massive task for human resources teams if they have to do everything manually.

As new technologies emerge, end-to-end application stacks continue to grow, and connected devices become more omnipresent in everyday lives, our society will only become more intrinsically connected across multiple touchpoints. It’s even estimated that in the US alone, there will be roughly 200 billion IoT devices by the end of 2020.

An independent guest blogger wrote this blog. If you do a web search for “cybersecurity skills gap,” you’ll get many, many pages of results. It’s certainly a hot topic in our industry. And it’s a matter that security practitioners and human resources people often disagree on. But before I get further into the matter, it would help to know what it is we’re talking about when we use the phrase “cybersecurity skills gap.”