Another year and another slew of cybersecurity challenges on the horizon. Enjoy these recent thought-provoking pieces covering a range of perspectives on various aspects of cybersecurity. The list of cybersecurity topics sure doesn’t get any smaller, does it?

Meltdown and Spectre

We began the year in cybersecurity with some of the worst news about the chips in nearly every computer used today. This piece in Defense One says Meltdown and Spectre should concern everyone, and especially those in the government who have focused almost exclusively on software.

The Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities are just a take-off point for this article which also talks about the litany of major corporate security breaches we’ve seen in the past few years to ask “Will U.S. Corporations Ever Take Cybersecurity Seriously?” IEEE Spectrum also examines the role of government regulation and the elephant in the corner of every CISO’s office these days; GDPR.

Correcting the Imbalance of Women in Cybersecurity

Only 11 percent of cybersecurity professionals are women. With a shortfall of 1.8 million professionals predicted by 2022, it is the perfect time to correct this imbalance. This piece talks about the results of a recent survey about why women are staying away and a lot of it comes down to the industry not communicating very well about what it means to work in cybersecurity.

Introducing Young Women to Careers in Cybersecurity

Texas is getting an early start on helping shift the tides of women in cybersecurity careers with a new program that introduces high school girls to the field with a cybersecurity training program. The initiative, called Girls Go CyberStart, comes in the form of a free, online game that helps students discover cybersecurity skills and learn about the emerging industry. Gov. Greg Abbott announced the training program on Friday and said it would be supported by the SANS Institute, a national cybersecurity education center.

Groundhog Day for Cybersecurity

In this article on CSO Online, “Listening to the echoes of cybersecurity history” the author reminds us that despite the technology advances … “the problems are the same, the impacts are worse, and while we make progress in discrete areas, at a meta level we’ve effectively been standing still.” So unless we want to end up in a Groundhog Day endless loop, we need to let the lessons of the past inform our actions today.

IoT Headache or Cure for Cybersecurity

This article posits that the until-now dismal record of IoT security presents a great opportunity to revolutionize cyberdefense technology, including the need to improve on standard encryption, using blockchain technology, the limits of government regulation and the need to prepare for a post-quantum world.