Tribe of Hackers Security Leaders

26Mark Hillick

“It's incredibly rewarding watching others grow.”

Twitter: @markofu • Website: www.linkedin.com/in/hillick

Mark Hillick is currently the director of security at Riot Games, where he leads the security department from a tech and product perspective. Their goal is to enable Rioters to securely ship fun player experiences and games with high integrity. Mark has been involved in InfoSec for almost 20 years and has run CTFs, done more certs and incident responses than he can remember, and presented at conferences such as BruCon and AWS Re:Invent.

Do you believe there is a massive shortage of career cybersecurity professionals?

Not to turn the question around, but I believe it's a shortage of “good” security professionals versus a shortage of people (interested) in cybersecurity.

I think we need to be more open about hiring from other disciplines, and I don't necessarily mean networking, DevOps/sysadm, or software development, but even outside of technology altogether. People like Charles Munger, David Epstein, and Nasim Taleb talk about a multidisciplinary approach in their writings about their various fields, and I think we (in InfoSec) need to take a leaf out of that thinking.

I also believe our field could do with becoming a little bit more approachable. Although more “rock stars” have been called out in recent years, the industry still has a tendency to overanalyze, ...