Calling cybersecurity students whiz-kids seems a lot like saying “rocket scientist” in the 1950s. No surprise then that the term comes up in a story related to how the US need to attract talent for a cyberspace race

“A radical shortage of skilled cyber guardians and cyber warriors is making the U.S. unable to adequately defend our systems and unable to project power effectively in cyber space,” says Paller.

Guardians and warriors? Can you tell the military might be funding this? The guns and boots are trying to paint themselves more and more into a humanitarian picture with missions like Pacific Partnership 2009, so this hardly seems like the time to start calling anyone with a keyboard a warrior. Obviously there are some cobwebs in the marketing files. Anyone else find it ironic that America will try to enlist cyber warriors while its armed forces try to rebrand themselves into health and human service agents?

Anyway, Paller is perhaps best known for helping to establish the SANS institute in 1989. It has grown into a giant system that claims more than 400 courses in 90 cities around the world. It kind of begs the question why aren’t the whiz-kids coming out of the SANS system already? Paller doesn’t answer this in the article.

Paller says the initiative is intended to address concerns that the U.S. will not have enough cybersecurity professionals in coming years. The U.S. Department of Defense trains just 80 cybersecurity professionals a year; with cybercrime escalating, experts project a need for on the order of 20,000 to 30,000 security experts in coming years.

Heh, that seems like a lot but it’s really just peanuts for an institute the size of SANS. They claim hundreds of thousands are trained by them. Perhaps a majority of the top students are from outside the US? I saw a recent statistic that said there are more honor students in India than the total number of students in America.

This makes me think about one morning in 1993. I had been up all night to get Internet video running. I presented it to my so-called college “adviser” at the time. I know I was beaming, despite no sleep, because I stood up and excitedly said “you see, the Internet can broadcast around the world! We could be our own CNN”.

This venerable and decorated professor of political science looked at the video I was playing, looked at me, then looked at the video and said “why don’t you just do your F$#^%$ng homework”. I saw his point, but he did not see mine. With information dissemination comes resource issues and ultimately strife related to power over those resources. He still wasn’t impressed. Information flow is disruptive. I knew I was on to something…

Now that we have security careers dangling about as well as growing social appeal for hacking I doubt there will be any trouble rounding up young candidates to compete for top whiz…and not a day too soon. However, there is a more fundamental issue about education in America here. That is why I hope advisers can steer interested students towards emerging technology and learning to adapt systems to challenges of rapid change rather than trying to simply increase numbers of graduates who can excel within existing conservative/antiquated tests.

The definition and marketing of an “expert role” in cyber security is on the table. I predict warriors and guardians will be the wrong way to describe actual needs today and if they are trained as such will be insufficiently skilled in the very near future.