BACK IN August when Windows zombies took Twitter down repeatedly (and to an extent Facebook also) [1, 2], some journalists went as far as suggesting that Microsoft should be sued.
A crippling DDoS attack over the weekend against open-source hosting service Bitbucket and Amazon's EC2 service has questions being raised about the speed and effectiveness of Amazon's response to the emergency, as well as the general reliability of cloud services.
“I’m not sure there are even a handful (of experts) with any sort of broad experience,” said expert number five, who is usually associated with security hardware. “There probably are pockets of them, with specialized narrow experience, e.g. in banking, virus or DOS attacks, military networks, etc.. And even if there were 1,000, what would they be doing on behalf of Uncle Sam?”
That’s a great question given that we as a nation can’t seem to hire and keep a national cybersecurity czar. So what are we doing hiring 1,000 experts given there is no boss?
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The DHS is extremely unlikely to be able to find and train 1,000 cybersecurity experts in three years. Maybe they’ll come up with 100 (more likely 5-10), but the DHS environment will make it unlikely — very unlikely — that all of those 100 will stick around.
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“Sure there are 1,000 (cybersecurity experts),” he said, ” but they are already employed… as hackers.”