Interviews

Cyber on 5 Live

by Mark Rowe

Mike Gillespie, of cyber-security company Advent IM, and Stephanie Daman, CEO of the Cyber Security Challenge, spoke live on BBC Radio 5 Live about cyber security on Monday morning, March 31.

Mike, who is a director of the Security Institute, began by speaking of a struggle to recruit. “Most of us in the profession today are first generation hobbyists, practitioners; we get into security because it was a hobby of ours; we found we could get jobs doing it. Most of us have been fortunate enough to do our hobbies for a living, most of our lives.” If someone was good at maths at school, they could go into cryptography. Skills besides IT will enable people to have a career in cyber-security. “We struggle to recruit very much,” Gillespie said, both to start people in the profession and to make them stay.

What do you do in cyber-security? the presenter Victoria Derbyshire asked. Gillespie replied: “You could be working with a range of other professions, helping them to understand their part in the whole cyber-security landscape. We work not only with IT people, HR people, business people, on business strategy, helping organisations to build a strategic approach to security, rather than just a technological one.” Many of the data breaches are because of poor education in the general workforce, such as clicking on phishing emails that seek to trick people into giving passwords. “So we need to educate the workforce as a whole. A lot of our time is spent with non-technological people.”

As for what cyber-crime is, Gillespie said that a lot of cyber-crime is about the skimming of information that we are making public, through such social media as Linkedin, used by the criminals to second-guess passwords. He warned against use of the same passwords for personal and business accounts. One a password is compromised on one system, such as Facebook or Twitter, it’s compromised for everything you use.

Earlier, Stephanie Daman spoke likewise of how people might have marketable skills, but they do not know there are jobs out there: “We need to reach these people and draw them into the industry.” She suggested a need for hundreds of thousands of UK cyber-security professionals, though the cyber profession was young and not defined. “It’s very difficult to give an actual figure, but we are talking hundreds of thousands, without doubt.” She added that the UK has done done school teaching of computing very well; many in cyber are self-taught.

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