97 Things Every Information Security Professional Should Know

Chapter 31. All Signs Point to a Schism in Cybersecurity

Ian Barwise

A schism is a division or disunion, especially into mutually opposed parties.

The cybersecurity industry is at a crossroads. Each week there are new reports of data breaches and ransomware attacks that expose personally identifiable information (PII) and personal health information (PHI) as well as financial, proprietary, password, and sensitive information that is very damaging to individuals, organizations, and governments across all industries. We will continue to see the effects of these breaches for years to come.

But it’s not as if computers or networks and the technical protocols they operate on are new inventions and it’s not as though cybersecurity is some new field of study. Information and communications technology (ICT) has been around for decades and the entire time it has existed, there have been vulnerabilities that have been consistently exploited by criminal hackers. It’s not new; this is an old game of whack-a-mole. You patch one hole and hackers pop up through another.

There is a schism that has formed within the information security industry and the rest of the world, including commercial industry, government, and criminal enterprises. As employers’ performance expectations continue to rise and they continue to complain about a self-perceived “skills gap” there is a mountain of evidence to ...