The need to incent and educate control system cyber security experts

Earlier this week, DHS Secretary Janet Nepalitano came to San Jose State University to recruit college students for a career in cyber security. She mentioned that DHS has been hiring computer scientists, analysts, etc but didn’t mention control systems. This afternoon I sat in on a call with the Navy with a similar conversation.  In both cases, the intent was to get to kids early to get them interested in a career in cyber security.  Control system cyber security is different in that you need an understanding of engineering as well as computer security.  There are currently two areas that need to be addressed to get more people into this important area. The first are the control system engineers and technicians already in the workplace. How do we incent them to get involved in security? To date, it isn’t working well.  The second is how to incent high school or college students. This requires a two-fold path. The first is to get a technical education on control systems at either the community college level for technicians or the engineering discipline at the college/university level. The second part is to get them interested in cyber security. Moreover, it requires finding experts to teach these classes. It will be interesting to see how successful this will be.

Joe Weiss