NSA Built Stuxnet, but Real Trick Is Building Crew of Hackers – US News and World Report
February 1, 2013 at 1:20 am 3 comments
If the reporter really understood NSA’s strategies for building up their cybersecurity workforce, they would said “personpower” instead of “manpower.” NSA is a big supporter of the Anita Borg Institute and the Grace Hopper Conference. They recognize that they’ll need women to help fill those cybersecurity ranks.
When Stuxnet—a massive computer worm that damaged a uranium enrichment plant in Iran—was discovered in 2010, cybersecurity experts marveled at its intricacy and power.
But maybe just as impressive as the exploit itself was the fact that the National Security Administration was able to find the manpower needed to design the attack.
That’s because the NSA, CIA, the Army’s Cyber Command, and private companies are quickly learning there aren’t enough cybersecurity experts steeped in the skills needed to wage cyberwarfare.
Experts have suggested that the United States government will need to hire at least 10,000 cybersecurity experts over the next several years, while the private sector will need even more. While most of those jobs are in defense, there’s also a growing need for people who are able to hack into complicated networks.
via NSA Built Stuxnet, but Real Trick Is Building Crew of Hackers – US News and World Report.
Entry filed under: Uncategorized. Tags: cybersecurity, women in computing.
Computing Education Research Blog 
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alfredtwo | February 1, 2013 at 8:12 am
We (the US) train a lot of Chinese computer scientists who return to China after graduation. Generally we make them leave even if they want to stay. I have read suggestions that this is helping build up China’s cyber warfare capability. Now I’m not saying we should stop training Chinese students but should we really force talented computer scientists (or engineers and other scientists) to return to home countries after graduation? NSA and other government agencies often can’t hire foreign nationals for what amounts to reasonable security reasons but that makes it even more imperative that we (and by we I mean the government) makes it clear that they need and will hire cyber security experts for good jobs. That would help get more students into the field.
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alfredtwo | February 1, 2013 at 8:19 am
BTW Mark Russinovich a Technical Fellow at Microsoft and security expert has written a couple of novels based around cyber warfare and cyber security. They are scary in their plausibility. If someone were to make a movie out of one of them we have as many people wanting to go into cyber security as want to go into some other fields that have been movie themes.
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Frank | February 2, 2013 at 1:27 am
Please Mark, I respect your research, teaching innovations, and opinions on sexism within computing – but promoting cyberwarfare as a legitimate career path for either men or women is irresponsible and utterly against the principles of science. We don’t need programmers to design the next generation of drones and spy tools for big brother .We need programmers to help dismantle these weapons.