As the cybersecurity industry works to address a shortage of skilled workers, an advertisement backed by the UK government may provide an example of what not to do.

The ad, which encouraged people working in the arts to retrain in cybersecurity, has been abandoned amid backlash online and even within the government, according to reports from The Guardian, The Washington Post and MarketWatch.

Although pulled from the official website, the ad was still easily viewable after going viral on social media with the hashtag “#SavetheArts.” The image displays a ballet dancer tying her shoes. The caption reads, “Fatima’s next job could be in cyber (she just doesn’t know it yet),” followed by the tagline “Rethink. Reskill. Reboot.”

Posted on the website of training firm QA, the ad was part of the UK cybersecurity agency’s Cyber First campaign, which promotes tech training for young people. Oliver Dowden, the British culture secretary, tweeted that the ad was “crass” and did not come from his agency. A spokesperson for the prime minister said, “This particular piece of content was not appropriate and has been removed from the campaign.”

The UK government’s volte-face followed widespread criticism that the ad showed disrespect toward the culture sector, which has been suffering catastrophic job losses. The author Caitlin Moran tweeted: “I don’t know if the government know they appear to have recently created a ‘Hopes & Dreams Crushing Department,’ but for a country already depressed and anxious, I would suggest it’s a bit of a ‘Not now, dudes’ moment?" The shadow health minister, Rosena Allin-Khan, chimed in: “Fatima, you be you. Don’t let anyone else tell you that you aren’t good enough because you don’t conform to their preconceived social norms.”

Meanwhile, a recent survey finds that most people say a career in cybersecurity isn’t for them, despite the sector’s demand for talent. Among 2,500 U.S. and UK workers surveyed by (ISC)2, 69% said that while cybersecurity seems like a good career path, it isn’t the right personal fit.

The world of analytics is changing.  Self-Service Analytical tools like Tableau, Qlik, and Power BI are enabling business users to perform reporting and analytics on their own with little to no support from the IT organization. This trend has evolved due to several factors including:

1)    Organizations are flooded with data and IT organizations are not able to keep up
2)    Easier to use Business Intelligence tools make it more efficient for business users to directly create their reports rather than go through IT for a project
3)    IT organizations analytical projects can take several months when a business needs this information in weeks

This trend has caused the efforts of IT Business Intelligence (BI) teams to spending most of their energy gathering, cleaning, and structuring data for the business to perform their own analytics through a self-service model. In special cases, they provide industrial strength reporting that can scale to thousands of users where trusted verified data is needed.  However, they are still being shown the door when it comes to some of the more interesting work.

What can IT BI teams do to stay relevant and valuable to the business? We have several suggestions that relate to embracing self-service analytics as the new reality and transitioning core competencies of the Business Intelligence team away from purely descriptive reporting and moving to diagnostic & predictive analytics.

Let’s explain that last concept before prescribing several solutions. The current state of most analytics is descriptive in nature and helps answer questions of, “what occurred?” Diagnostic and Predictive Analytics help answer the questions of, “Why did it occur?” and sets the stage to answer, “What can I do about it?”  Diagnostic Analytics helps organizations to not only understand what, but also why and what decisions and actions can be taken to solve for the issue. This type of analytics is more valuable to the business and requires competencies that IT BI teams are uniquely qualified to bring from their years of building analytical solutions.

To enable IT Business Intelligence teams to move up the value chain from providing commodity reports to business driving analytics, we recommend adding these four components:

1. Build out a Data Science capability– Data Scientists are starting to appear in analytical groups within companies. However, they are still not pervasive and the function is understaffed. In addition, most groups within a company cannot justify the cost of a full-time data scientist. By adding data scientists to the IT BI organization, you are creating a centralized team that can provide analytics to underserved parts of the organization.  This team is already focused on creating analytical data structures and reports and adding the ability to derive insights from the data is a natural extension.   
2. Make it about the Decision– In your requirements process, add Decision Architecture Methodology as a capability. Most methodologies for capturing analytical requirements focus on the questions asked of the data to surmise the Dimensions and Facts.  While this gives us great descriptive analytics, but it does not move the company along the analytical maturity curve.  A deeper focus on the decisions that the business makes and thereby centering analytical capabilities around helping to enable actionable insights will move the needle.
3. Add Decision Theory to your analytics– If Data Science helps you turn information into actionable insights, Decision Theory helps you structure the decision process to guide a person to the correct choice. Decision Theory, along with Behavioral Economics, is focused on understanding the components of the decision process to explain why we make the choices we do. It provides a systematic way to consider tradeoffs among attributes that helps us make better decisions. Tools such as thresholds, alerts, decision matrixes, and choice architecture should be considered important capabilities to add to your team’s tool chest.
4. Create a Report Certification process– As report proliferation occurs with self-service analytics, creating a standard for the health and validity of a report is going to be important if the analytics are to be consumed by a broader audience and are to be trusted.  For example, you may have one group create a report with key metrics sourced from uncertified data sources. By putting reports from individual departments through a certification process similar to UL labeling on electrical products, broader consumers will know the level of scrutiny that has been put on the report by Data Governance and IT teams and thereby trust the data and metrics contained within it.

As IT Business Intelligence teams look to move up the value chain in the capabilities they offer to their internal customers, adding addition skillsets, methods, and tools will be a necessity. The capabilities outlined are a great fit for a centralized team to own and this transformation in IT BI teams can speak to the value these enhanced capabilities provide to the business.

Andrew Roman Wells is the CEO of Aspirent, a management-consulting firm focused on analytics. Kathy Williams Chiang is VP, Business Insights, at Wunderman Data Management. They are the co-authors of Monetizing Your Data: A Guide to Turning Data into Profit-Driving Strategies and Solutions. For more information, please visit www.monetizingyourdata.com.

It’s no surprise that big data is on the rise in businesses around the world. Companies routinely use big data to analyze common trends in their practice; enabling them to make sophisticated decisions to ensure their businesses prosper. According to Statista, an online statistics, market research and business intelligence portal; companies routinely use data to drive process and cost efficiency; drive strategy; and to monitor and improve financial performance. When used in these ways, data has the ability to save the company a significant amount of money because they are able to spend their money efficiently.

While data does have the ability to improve a company’s performance; companies just aren’t catching up on the trends as fast as one would assume.  Big Data software company, Quoble along with Dimensional Research; recently published an e-book, “An In-Depth Look at Big Data Trends and Challenges”. As the name suggests, the data looks at global data trends in the workplace and the problems that businesses often face.

Among the issues that the research uncovered was, “the realization of value from big data in on-premises environments has lagged expectations, largely due to complexity, cost overruns, steep demands for specialized talent, and need for powerful computing platforms.” While companies may understand the value that big data brings their company; finding qualified candidates and obtaining funds to purchase the computing platforms needed to manage data sets are among the set backs employers are facing today. Nearly 75% of those surveyed sighted a gap between the necessary resources and tools that are available to them. And while 50% of businesses plan to moderately increase their data headcounts in the next year; 83% find it difficult to find the right candidate.  Not only does it take time to find the money to pay for data headcounts; finding the right candidate can often times be complex and time consuming.

The survey found that big data teams’ lack of experience creates a slow progress to get things done. 42% also sight that it is hard to keep up with big data trends and new data sources.  Big Data is constantly expanding. Five years ago machine learning and AI weren’t as mainstream as they are now. BI tools were available but not widely used and companies didn’t have big data teams. In fact their “team” often consisted of one or two data scientists. Big Data’s continuous growth has lead to expansion that many businesses can’t keep up with.

The intention of Quoble’s “An In-Depth Look at Bid Data Trends and Challenges” is  not to solve these problems, but to bring awareness to the issues that companies are facing when it comes to data.  As big data continues to surge, so will an influx of knowledgeable employees and efficient software that will guide the business to succeed in an age where big data is becoming the norm.

To view the full report, go to Quoble’s website and download the free e-book.

Colleagues think of data analysis much in the same way they think about marketing. Which is everyone thinks they are data analysts. With little to no practice they can put together graphs and visualize data at the drop of a hat. When interviewing Dave from accounting he made sure you knew that he has Tableau reader on his desktop which totally means he’s one step away from Tableau certification. Karen from Sales also discussed her extensive knowledge when it came to Excel. Yes, that same Karen who emailed you a month ago and asked how a pivot table worked.

If you’re interested in a career in big data it shouldn’t be daunting, but you should take the time to research and learn the tools and software needed to excel (pun intended) at the job. Data analysis is so much more than filtering data and pretty graphs. It takes someone who is curious and can think analytically to thrive in the job.

In his 2009 book, Now You See it: Simple Visualization Techniques for Quantitative Analysis; author and information technology innovator Stephen Few lists 13 key traits of a data analyst. Among those traits include, self-motivation; open-mindedness; and the ability to spot patterns. An average data analyst can access a data set; scrub the data; and visualize it using one of numerous data visualization platforms available. She then comes to conclusions based on those visualizations and calls it a day. An exceptional data analyst can use that same data set and visualization tools and come to the same conclusions. The difference is that he will ask different questions and hypothesize about why conclusions are what they are. An exceptional data analyst asks why 9 out of 10 dentists prefer Colgate or why Rugby is becoming a more popular youth sport in the United States while lacrosse youth teams are declining.  For them, it isn’t enough that the data shows an increase in Rugby youth teams. They have to know why. Which will ultimately bring them to more questions which will lead to more data sets and more visualizations. In essence, is a data analyst’s job ever really done?

Another factor that separates a mediocre from an excellent analyst is the ability to tell a story. Unless you are speaking to a fellow analyst, chances are spewing out data isn’t going to capture the attention or the comprehension of what the statistics show. In fact, if you go that route, you may be met with a lot of blank stares. It’s important to tailor a narrative to the audience you are speaking to. Crafting a story beforehand makes it easy for your audience to follow and will help you answer any follow up questions that you might receive.

While you may have the skills that make an excellent data analyst, without practice you’ll never truly be outstanding at your job. And with data analysts and scientists being critical to the success of a company, it’s important that you push past mediocrity and aim for excellent. So tomorrow when you go into work remember that not everyone can be an analyst but by methodically thinking, crafting a perfect story from your data sets and asking questions, you’ll be on the road to greatness.

Congress is in the midst of a bipartisan effort to revamp federal laws for information security, and the Biden administration’s top cyber officials have voiced their staunch support.

As The Washington Post reports, the Senate Homeland Security Committee recently held a hearing on two upcoming cyber bills. One piece of draft legislation would require operators of critical infrastructure to report data breaches to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency. The committee is also at work on redrafting the Federal Information Security Management Act, last updated in 2014, which sets the federal government’s cybersecurity rules.

CISA director Jen Easterly told lawmakers she is a “huge supporter” of the proposed legislation that would mandate cyberattack disclosure by government contractors, federal agencies and certain private companies, as Bloomberg reports. Chris Inglis, the U.S. national cyber director, said such notifications would be “profoundly useful.”

Both Easterly and Inglis endorsed fining companies if they don’t report data breaches. “Most of the 50 states have reporting requirements of a similar sort, and the vast majority of them have enforcement mechanisms, and many use fines,” Inglis said, as quoted by Government Technology

As Utility Dive sums up, Easterly called for the bill to codify CSO’s role as the operational lead in federal cybersecurity. Easterly also urged lawmakers to shift to operational risk management from mere compliance-list-checking. And she pressed for a national notification law so CISA can share information promptly.

Easterly said the legislation must be designed to avoid unnecessarily weighing down businesses or CISA. “We don’t want to be flooded with reports saying, ‘We detected something; we’re not sure whether there’s actual impact or not.’ We need to make sure there’s determined impact,” Easterly said. “What we don’t want is to have CISA overburdened with erroneous reporting, and we don’t want to burden a company under duress when they’re trying to manage a live incident.”

The committee’s chair, Sen. Gary Peters (D-Mich.), reportedly plans to formally introduce a cyberattack disclosure bill in the weeks ahead. “We need to pass updated legislation clarifying CISA’s role and responsibilities, improve how incidents on federal networks are being reported to Congress and ensure our own cybersecurity resources are aligned with emerging threats,” Peters said, as quoted by Tech Target.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has signed a bill that changes the state’s data breach notification requirements, effective September 1. So reports Business Insurance.

The new law requires the Texas attorney general to post a listing of breaches that involve at least 250 of the state’s residents.

A similar law in California requires such posts for breaches that involve 500 or more residents.

Read the full article from Business Insurance.

Colorado lawmakers have passed the Colorado Privacy Act, making the state the third to enact legislation protecting consumer data. So reports The Colorado Sun.

The measure would allow Colorado residents to ask companies to delete their personal data.

At press time, the bill was still pending a signature from Gov. Jared Polis.

Read the full article from The Colorado Sun. 

Democratic and Republican lawmakers have recently unveiled a wide range of cybersecurity bills. So reports GovInfoSecurity.

In the Senate, the International Cybercrime Prevention Act would stiffen penalties for hacking critical infrastructure, while in the House, the Enhancing K-12 Cybersecurity Act aims to protect school districts.

Another Senate bill, the Data Protection Act, would create a new agency to protect Americans’ private data.

Read the full article from GovInfoSecurity.

Popular gaming platform Roblox has said that no external factors were to blame for a recent three-day service blackout.

Roblox has more than 43 million active daily users, 40 million games and 9.5 million developers, according to The Hill, which cites data from consulting firm Backlinko. The platform is especially popular among children from 9 to 12 years old, and The New York Times reported on mass unease as kids couldn’t play during the outage, which lasted October 28 to October 31.

Roblox CEO David Baszucki wrote on the company’s website that the outage “involved a combination of several factors.”

Baszucki said: “A core system in our infrastructure became overwhelmed, prompted by a subtle bug in our backend service communications while under heavy load. This was not due to any peak in external traffic or any particular experience. Rather the failure was caused by the growth in the number of servers in our data centers.”

He added that service took longer to restore because of difficulty diagnosing the initial problem.

As the BBC reports, Roblox has dismissed viral speculation that the outage was related to an in-game promotion from Chipotle. Nor was there an “external intrusion,” the company said to The Verge.

Major outages are fairly common, The Wall Street Journal notes, citing Facebook’s recent apology for downtime that affected its platforms and apps. According to a survey by Uptime Institute LLC, a consultancy, some sort of outage has hit 69% of data-center operators since 2018, with human error at issue in 78% of cases.

Still, gaming website Rock Paper Shotgun observes that compared with newer games, it’s rarer for an established platform like Roblox to go down, and for the outage to last such a long time.

GameSpot.com reports that Roblox had not yet fully explained what brought service down in the first place, with more details still expected as of press time.

The advantages and disadvantages of artificial intelligence and machine learning for cybersecurity practitioners are the subject of thoughtful debate lately.

As IT Business Edge notes, AI has become a crucial weapon in the cybersecurity arsenal in recent years, enabling better prediction of attacks and even helping cut down on frequency and impact of attacks.

Other benefits of AI include being able to handle vast amounts of data, to adapt quickly, to detect new cybersecurity risks early, to monitor threats in real-time and curb phishing. According to one recent survey, about four-fifths of U.S.-based organizations deem AI necessary for cybersecurity.

However, hackers enjoy the fruits of AI, too, and use the technology to pull off ever more complex cyberattacks. AI-enabled devices could also pose privacy risks. Moreover, the cost of talent in the developing AI space is high.

According to CPO Magazine, one way that AI has encroached upon cybersecurity is by hackers using “synthetic images” to extract usernames and passwords, thereby gaining access to confidential data on a device. A team of researchers has also come up with AI clever enough to fool the Captcha tests used to determine if a website is being accessed by a human.

There are other positives. As Edtech Magazine observes, machine learning can also help cybersecurity defense increase in scale as the number of endpoints increases, such as with the past year’s shift to remote learning.

Still, Matthew Carroll, CEO at cybersecurity firm Immuta, has called AI “cybersecurity’s blind spot.” Writing for GCN.com, Carroll concluded, “The long-term success of the nation’s cybersecurity policies will rest on how accurately they apply to the world of AI.”

In the meantime, IT Business Edge suggests an approach combining AI capabilities with human oversight, striking a balance to be sure the system isn’t being manipulated or relying on flawed reasoning. CPO Magazine calls for a coalition of nations, companies and cybersecurity experts to harness the potential of AI before the hackers do.

A handful of recent studies show the prevalence of supply chain data breaches but also an increased pace of IT budget growth.

Fully 97% of businesses have been affected by a cybersecurity breach in their supply chain, according to a study by cybersecurity firm BlueVoyant, as Fox Business reports. Plus 93% of firms said that lapses in their supply chain had caused them to undergo a direct cybersecurity breach.

Adam Bixler, global head of third-party cyber risk management at BlueVoyant, called breaches “still staggeringly high.” The study was performed by independent research organization Opinion Matters. Respondents included 1,200 IT executives in organizations with headcounts of more than 1,000, from various industries in the United States and abroad.

Driving home the risks, a separate study by cybersecurity firm Randori finds that one in 15 organizations are running vulnerable versions of SolarWinds software, which last year was at the center of one of the biggest hacks in history, as VentureBeat reports. And half of organizations are running versions of other software that Randori deems tempting to hackers, such as Cisco’s ASA firewall and Citrix NetScaler, according to the study.

On the other hand, IT budgets are projected to grow at their quickest clip in more than a decade, according to a Gartner study and as reported by The Wall Street Journal and others. The research and advisory firm surveyed nearly 2,400 chief information officers and tech executives in a range of industries. Respondents forecast a 2% increase in IT budgets for 2021 and another 3.6% growth next year.

Two-thirds of IT executives surveyed said they will boost their cybersecurity budgets. Gartner research vice president Monika Sinha told the Journal that CIOs were also spending on tech to make businesses more adaptable.

Government IT managers, meanwhile, are perhaps surprisingly upbeat, a BeyondTrust study finds, as GCN reports. Of 200 senior IT and security professionals polled from the public sector, 96% said they have enough funding to meet their cybersecurity budgets.

“While the findings of this report support an optimistic outlook, cybersecurity processes and technologies must adapt to what attackers are doing in the future, not just what is occurring today,” the study finds.

While recent focus has been on ransomware attacks with national security implications, a recent data breach at wireless provider T-Mobile still holds lessons for the cybersecurity community, recent reports suggest.

As The Wall Street Journal reports, T-Mobile has confirmed that hackers stole the personal data of 54 million people, including birthdates and Social Security numbers. Hackers then tried to sell the information online for between $80,000 and $270,000 in bitcoin. The Federal Communications Commission was reportedly investigating.

As The Washington Post notes, while these types of attacks may lack the headline-grabbing drama of ransomware, the T-Mobile breach shows that the threat from hackers who steal data simply to sell it online remains serious. Brett Callow, a threat analyst at Emisoft, told The Post, “The motivation obviously is money.”

The incident also raises the question of why certain companies seem particularly prone to cyberattacks. Forrester security and risk analyst Allie Mellen told The Post that the breach is at least the fifth in four years for T-Mobile. Mergers and acquisitions, such as T-Mobile’s combination with Sprint last year, can make it harder to align cybersecurity standards, Mellen observed.

There’s an old saying about why bank robbers rob banks: because that’s where the money is. Michael Daniel, president and CEO of the Cyber Threat Alliance, pointed out to The Post that cybercriminals target companies “where there are large pools of customer data available.”

Still, as The Washington Post notes in a separate report, even tens of millions of data breach victims may not be enough to capture public attention in an era when news of cyberattacks have become routine. The T-Mobile breach may wind up as a defining example of what security researchers call “breach fatigue.”

As AdAge reports, customers might “shrug off” the news. Marketing experts and analysts said that while new users might be reluctant to sign up with T-Mobile while the breach is top of mind, existing customers will probably stay put. They might have even expected as much. A Compliance Week headline calls T-Mobile’s hack “the least surprising data breach of 2021.” Nevertheless, according to Bloomberg Law, T-Mobile faces a pair of class action lawsuits alleging violations of the California Consumer Privacy Act.

T-Mobile is working with Mandiant and KPMG to bolster its cybersecurity, reports The Verge. In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, the 21-year-old taking responsibility for the attack called the company’s defenses “awful.”