• CyberForce Program Now offering Year-Round Cyber Defense Events

    The cybersecurity field is facing a shortfall of 1.8 million professionals by 2022. To fill that skills gap, Argonne, in partnership with DOE, launched CyberForce in 2016 as an annual competition that has challenged college teams to build and defend a simulated energy infrastructure from cyber attacks. DOE is now expanding its CyberForce program and offers more ways for students to test their cybersecurity skills.

  • Will China Retaliate Against U.S. Chip Sanctions?

    In response to a series of Chinese trade infractions (intellectual property theft, forced technology transfers, cyber espionage, and WTO violations), the U.S. government implemented a sanctions regime which has inflicted increasing pain on China’s semiconductor industry. The Biden administration has doubled down on the Trump’s sanction strategy against China’s high-tech sector. Terry Daly and Jordan Schneider write that China has so far abstained from taking major retaliatory measures against the United States, but this is not likely to last. “The prudent course in a period of uncertainty is risk mitigation. This applies to countries and companies alike,” Daly and Schneider write.

  • Did the Cybersecurity Workforce Gap Distract Us from the Leak?

    There are 500,000 unfilled cybersecurity positions in the United States, and the number is growing. The government and private companies have been investing a lot of money and effort in training and recruiting young cybertalent through college programs, school partnerships, and by adjusting pay and benefit packages, but many have missed a significant leak in cyber workforce funnel: the rapid burnout and churn. In fact, the cyber workforce gap is in experienced roles, not junior levels. To fill the cyber workforce gap, we need to find ways to retain experienced cybersecurity talent.

  • Understanding the U.K. Cybersecurity Labor Market

    The U.K. government is carrying out research to help understand and measure the U.K. cybersecurity labor market. This will help inform future policy and strategy.

  • Closing the Skills Gap in the Cyber Workforce

    There are currently more than three million unfilled cybersecurity jobs globally, and, as high-profile incidents like the Solar Winds attack demonstrate, it is vital to address that shortage. But it is difficult for organizations to find and recruit the cyber talent they need.

  • How America Turned the Tables on Huawei

    The United States started warning allies and partners in 2019 that having the Chinese telecom firm Huawei build their 5G telecom infrastructure risked exposing their citizens’ and their official data to Chinese state surveillance. The Trump administration argued that countries should keep Huawei out, both for their own sake and for the sake of collective security among democratic allies.

  • Digital Forensics Student on Pace to Be on 1st U.S. Cyber Team

    UCF graduate student Cameron Whitehead is on track to become a member of the first U.S Cyber Team to represent the nation in the inaugural International Cyber Security Challenge later this year in Athens, Greece. Whitehead, who is studying for his master’s degree in digital forensics, recently placed second out of 688 competitors in the U.S. Cyber Open, the first qualifying step to join the team.

  • Broad Swath of the Web Knocked Offline by Outage

    A broad swath of the World Wide Web has been knocked offline by an outage at edge cloud CDN specialist Fastly. The company runs an “edge cloud,” which is designed to speed up loading times for websites, protect them from denial-of-service attacks, and help them deal with bursts of traffic. The technology requires Fastly to sit between most of its clients and their users. That means that if the service suffers a catastrophic failure, it can prevent those companies from operating on the net at all.

  • Fastly Global Internet Outage: Why Did So Many Sites Go Down — and What Is a CDN, Anyway?

    If you were having difficulty accessing your favorite website on Tuesday time, you’re not alone. A jaw-dropping number of major websites around the globe suddenly became unavailable with no immediately obvious explanation — before reappearing an hour later. To understand why it happened, you need to know what a CDN (content delivery network) is and how crucial they are to the smooth running of the internet.

  • The Weaponized Web: The National Security Implications of Data

    Open societies have encouraged and promoted rapid technological advancement and market innovation —but both have outpaced democratic governance. Authoritarian powers have noticed the underlying opportunity to exploit the open standards of the democratically regulated digital information environment and undermine democratic values and institutions while shoring up their own regimes. This poses a novel challenge for democracies, which must adapt to compete in this conflict over the data, architecture, and governance framework of the information space without compromising their democratic principles.

  • First Hacker-Resistant Cloud Software System

    As the first system to guarantee the security of virtual machines in the cloud, SeKVM could transform how cloud services are designed, developed, deployed, and trusted.

  • Cybersecurity as Counterterrorism: Seeking a Better Debate

    Earlier this month, a senior Justice Department official referred to ransomware as a potential “cyber weapon of mass destruction.” When hackers subsequently disabled the Colonial Pipeline, causing fuel shortages and disruptions along the East Coast, it seemed to validate this warning. Simon Handler, Emma Schroeder, and Trey Herr, however, write that it would be a mistake for the policy establishment to double down on an outdated view of cyber conflict rooted in Cold War analogies. To improve U.S. cybersecurity, policymakers should draw instead on more relevant strategic lessons from the study of terrorism and counterterrorism.

  • Cybersecurity Becomes Increasingly Important: USC Students Train to Secure Networks, Data

    With over half a million cybersecurity job openings in the industry and with increased reliance on insecure networks and infrastructures, experts say that now more than ever, students pursuing cybersecurity degrees are essential to keeping data secure. USC’s Intelligence and Cyber Operation Program trains students to identify cybersecurity issues.

  • How the Military Might Expand Its Cyber Skills

    As software has become an ever more integral part of life, national security experts have come to recognize that the U.S. military will need to improve its software fluency if it wants to remain dominant on the battlefields of the future.

  • Help Wanted: The Cybersecurity Workforce of the Future Starts with Students Today

    Today’s critical infrastructure systems from farm fields planted with digital sensors that track soil moisture and nutrient levels to electric power grids equipped to instantly respond to digital signals about shifts in supply and demand are increasingly vulnerable to attacks that could cripple civil society, according to cybersecurity experts. Today, there are nearly 2 million U.S. job openings in the field of cybersecurity, studies indicate.