The Cybersecurity Talent Famine Has a Surprising Solution

In cybersecurity, there seems to be a search for a magic bullet, a technological breakthrough that solves the problem once and for all. But to stay ahead of threat actors, agencies need more than technology. They need something that’s in short supply: talent. The talent famine is affecting both public and commercial organizations, with millions of unfilled jobs worldwide.  

In fact, CISA reported that there are more than 700,000 open cybersecurity positions in the U.S. alone, with more than 40,000 of those in the public sector. Agencies have been stepping up their recruiting for security positions. But the people you need to build your cyber team aren’t always where you’d expect to find them.

Filling the talent gap 

The challenge across government is that bad actors keep coming up with new ploys, while the pool of skilled people needed to combat them is severely limited.

But while the long ramp-up time to educate, onboard, and train talent has national security implications, cybersecurity has until recently been underfunded and under-resourced in many agencies’ budgets. The answer isn’t necessarily recruiting more cybersecurity experts. Instead, agencies can look for people with analytical expertise in a variety of areas.

Problem solvers are everywhere

The key skill in cybersecurity is problem solving, but that’s not a trait exclusive to computer science majors. Financial analysts, for example, spot—and resolve—errors, fraud, waste, and abuse every day. So do people in any number of operational positions. By widening the search beyond those hard-to-recruit security experts, government can tap a huge potential source for personnel who could be retrained for cyber teams.

There’s another option that doesn’t involve people making a career shift. Everyone from frontline customer service personnel to top decision makers has a part to play. If AI-driven automation tools could not only notice something out of the ordinary but also pop up an alert, in context to the situation and in natural language that the recipient understands, a user in any position can escalate the issue. By breaking down the barriers to communication, everyone can participate in creating a more secure environment.

AI helps level the playing field

When anomalies spotted by employees across the agency are fed into an agency’s threat intelligence system, they enrich relevant, real-time data that can help automation tools uncover potential and actual attacks. Threat intelligence correlates and analyzes data about your internal systems with outside information, including social media and news reports, and third-party data, including publicly and commercially available information (PAI/CAI). 

AI makes this capability faster and more efficient, by processing and learning from massive amounts of data and the experience of your people. This in turn creates a self-feeding cycle: threat intelligence helps the AI tools know when something unusual occurs, and the users add to that knowledge base every time they confirm or deny that suspicion. 

Users generally want to do the right thing. The challenge has always been how to surface the right data to the right person at the right time, in a format they can interact with, to take an action sooner. 

If users at all levels of the organization can interact with AI in natural language, this streamlines processes dramatically. Instead of searching for policies, emailing different teams, filling out forms, or calling IT or Legal, users can quickly get an answer that applies to their environment and a specific situation. 

These interactions also help the AI learn, and the best AI solutions also provide transparency around provenance and bias—the sources they used and how they weighted them. As a result, your ability to harness the power of AI improves with more interaction and understanding of how it “thinks.”

Activating the sentries

If an employee swiped their ID on the way out at 5:30 pm but the AI-powered system notices some online workstation activity from that same user at 6:45 pm, it could simply ask, “Is this you?” before contacting a security team. Depending on the answer, the system can automatically respond, potentially shutting down a breach before any damage is done. At the same time, knowledge of that particular attack vector is added to the threat intelligence database.

By “activating the sentries,” everyone contributes to a more secure environment. Cybersecurity, once the exclusive domain of a handful of trained specialists, becomes more distributed. While your cyber experts are still needed to manage the systems and contain any attacks, AI-based automation gives even non-specialists the ability to serve the larger cause of cybersecurity.

In reality, bad actors are already doing something along these lines. Many attackers aren’t tech experts; they’re scam experts using third-party tools, AI, and as-a-Service solutions to make their attacks operational. It’s cost-effective, fast, and requires minimal training. There’s no reason why agencies can’t fight back using a similar approach.

Zero Trust protects and empowers 

Ensuring both security and efficiency is crucial to every agency’s functioning; security still needs to allow business operations to continue smoothly for both internal users and customers of the agency. Zero Trust embodies your governance—not only the letter but the spirit of your guidelines, bolstering a culture of security throughout the agency. 

Zero Trust makes it easier for everyone to comply with governance, transforming security from a stumbling block to an enabler of business operations. Combined with AI-based automation that helps everyone support a smarter cyber defense, users gain confidence that data and systems are protected, allowing them to complete essential tasks, serve customers better, and move the mission forward.

While the talent famine is unlikely to be resolved quickly, agencies have plenty of options and opportunities to improve their cyber defenses. AI is a force multiplier and threat intelligence gives you early warnings about imminent attacks, but at its core, technology’s benefit is enabling agencies to take advantage of their most essential asset: their people.