Junior Cyber People

All links and images for this episode can be found on CISO Series (https://cisoseries.com/defense-in-depth-junior-cyber-people/)

There are so few jobs available for junior cybersecurity professionals. Are these cyber beginners not valued? Or are we as managers not creating the right roles for them to improve our own security?

Check out this post for the basis for our conversation on this week’s episode which features me, David Spark (@dspark), producer of CISO Series, co-host Allan Alford (@allanalfordintx), and guest Naomi Buckwalter (@ineedmorecyber), director of information security & privacy at Energage.

Thanks to this week's podcast sponsor, Salt Security.

Salt Security protects the APIs at the core of SaaS, web, and mobile applications. By using patented behavioral protection Salt Security automatically and continuously discovers and learns the granular behavior of each unique API and stops attacks. In 2020 Salt Security was named a Gartner Cool Vendor in API Strategy.

On this episode of Defense in Depth, you’ll learn:

• There are tons of newbies eager to work in cybersecurity. The shortcoming is not the available pipeline, but a lack of headcount and managers' willingness to train and find appropriate assignments.
• Because headcount is often the limitation to hiring, leaders will opt to hire the most senior person they can get.
• Common feeling is hire one experienced person and stress them out rather than hire three junior people and train them. Problem with the former is if you stress that experienced person they will leave and tell others not to work there.
• There is plenty of good junior-level cybersecurity work, such as asset management cleanup, PII discovery, procedure documentation, filling out security questionnaires, scrubbing and tuning out false positives from alerting systems, reviewing vendor contracts, patch verification, following up on vulnerability management with other teams, launching and managing vulnerability scans, interviewing for shadow IT installations, working with help desk for user account remediation, and scanning logs for anomalies.