According to the NPR, the U.S. may be the most vulnerable country in the world for a large-scale cyberattack, and that there are only "1,000 people in the entire United States" with the skills neccessary for complex cyberdefense tasks.
In a report, shortly to be released from the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), it is found that there is a "desperate shortage" of trained people who are able to "design secure systems, write safe computer code, and create the ever more sophisticated tools needed to prevent, detect, mitigate and reconstitute from damage due to system failures and malicious acts."
Cyberwarriors are highly trained inidividuals who are able to detect methods that could be used to penetrate government or large coporation networks, and have the neccessary skills to develop countermeasures to stop hackers. The lack of cyberwarriors, this seems to be in contrast with the Chinese situation, where the NPR say that "training of computer experts is a national priority" and that the Chinese government "appears to be systematically building a cyberwarrior force."
Alan Paller of the SANS institute (SysAdmin, Audit, Network, Security) said that a chinese youth who won a competition that singles out kids that are caught hacking was found hacking into the Pentagon, and as a result, they trained him and got him working "very, very fast."
As a result of this, the U.S government is planning to begin their own, similar program and are promoting a "U.S. Cyber Challenge" which is a "national talent search at the high school level." Apparently, the aim is to find as many as 10,000 young cyberwarriors. Senator Thomas Carper sees the challenge as an opportunity to utilise the talent saying that "not only for them to hone their skills on being able to hack into other systems, particularly those of folks we may not be fond of, but also to use what they learn to strengthen our defenses."
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