Shortage of Over A Million Cyber Security Experts Globally

A study by Cisco, the USA based MNC which focus on networking equipment, reveals a shortage of over a million cyber security professionals around the world. Cisco’s report is based on its Security Intelligence Operations (SIO) which plays a vital role in analyzing the threats, given the prevalence of its solutions and the breadth of its security intelligence Cisco leader Security Business (India and SAARC) Diwakar Dayal told PTI.

Since it began tracking in May 2000, overall vulnerability and threat levels have reached their highest in 2013. Dayal said that there is a lack of around 4,00,000 cyber professionals in India itself as per CERT reports in September last year citing that the Indian government websites had been breached for the past three years. According to the 2014 Annual Security Report (ASR) 2013 was a “particularly bad year”, with cumulative annual threat alert levels increasing by fourteen per cent since 2012. He added the ASR states that in the face of increased attack surface exposures, exponential improvements in attack sophistication, more widespread use of state of the black art monetisation techniques by attackers and involvement of rogue states, there is a worldwide shortage of nearly a million skilled security professionals.
Organizations in India are facing a rise in cyber-attacks and intrusions together with the scarcity of cyber experts. The report says that the hackers attack web servers and data centers with Android and Java being their most attractive security targets. Being an open platform with innumerable iterations, Android is easier to manipulate when compared to closed operating systems. Ninety-nine per cent of all mobile malware in 2013 targeted Android devices, it added.

SIO inspects about sixteen billion web requests daily through the Cisco Cloud Web Security and ninety three billion emails daily by Cisco’s hosted email solution, besides scritinizing two lakh IP addresses, four lakh malware samples, thirty three million endpoint files and twenty eight million network connects, Dayal said. “The primary challenges are greater attack surface, proliferation and sophistication of the attack model and complexity of threats and fragmented solutions” he added.