Cybersecurity jobs more important than ever following global outages

BATON ROUGE, La. (WAFB) – Many Microsoft computers were still stuck on the “blue screen of death” today after a buggy update caused a global outage last week. Some computer experts in Baton Rouge say the situation reinforces how cybersecurity provides job security now more than ever.

“A big part of cybersecurity, and particularly for risk is to understand those potential points of vulnerability or weakness within your organization. The impacts of last week were unforeseen because they couldn’t have anticipated how that single machine, that single update to that single client could’ve had so many profound impacts,” said Greg Trahan, the director of economic development at LSU with a special advisory role in cybersecurity.

While the outage was not the result of a hack, it revealed the importance of looking at how the systems that hold or share information are protected.

“I think it just reveals the companies the opportunity to look at if everything’s moving to digital, and it is, and their data is moving to digital, what’s most critical? And how do those systems that are protecting or communicating or transporting that data, what are they vulnerable to?” Trahan said.

Security experts in Baton Rouge say more and more businesses are transitioning to digital platforms for communication and data-sharing, making it more important to make sure that data is secure.

“Someone still has to be able to poke at those things, look at the risk that they pose, and of course provide testing and validation to inform these businesses on what’s out there and what could happen,” Kevin Ivy said, Trace Security director of security services.

Trahan says there are 400,000 to 700,000 available jobs in cybersecurity in the United States right now, and every field that deals with systems communicating data will need a way to protect it.

“If you want to move into the energy sector, you’re looking at critical infrastructure, if you want to look at shipping and logistics, even accounting and banking, there is not an industry now that will not be affected in some way by cyber and digital security, so it’s an open door to any environment you want to go,” Trahan said. “If you are in the cyber security or digital security field, you will never not be without a job. You will have a job forever.”

LSU is one of 21 schools in the country with a National Security Agency certification for their cybersecurity concentration. They anticipate the program will continue to see more students interested.

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