Travel piece nets student Tahoe trip

Michael Meerovich didn’t find any trace of Fredo Corleone this week, but he and his family discovered something much better — Lake Tahoe, a great place to go on vacation.

Meerovich, an eighth-grader at Discovery Charter School this past year, submitted the winning essay from among more than 150 entered from Southern Nevada in the 2016 Discover Your Nevada writing contest.

He, his parents and one of his best friends went on a three-day field trip to Northern Nevada. His teacher, Becca Weeks, was invited, but the newlywed decided to go on her honeymoon instead.

No matter. Meerovich and his pal, Jon Pearson, spent their time visiting the Rhyolite ghost town near Beatty, seeing the International Car Forest of the Last Church near Goldfield, stargazing at the Tonopah Historic Mining Park and spending the night at the seemingly haunted Mizpah

TRAVEL

cybersecurity personnel.

“The shortage of information security professionals is the most acute perhaps in the 20 years that Black Hat has been around,’’ said Tim Wilson, co-founder and editor in chief of Dark Reading, an industry news source. Dark Reading and Black Hat are owned by UBM.

Black Hat

Black Hat USA, which will be held at the Mandalay Bay, attracts more than 15,000 cybersecurity specialists representing both private industry and government from approximately 100 countries.

The event has grown more than six-fold since 2005 as cyberattacks become more prevalent and as the monetary and reputational losses from breaches grow.

This year’s attendees include security representatives from American Express, Exxon Mobil, Lockheed Martin, Sony Music, the Department of Justice and the U.S. Department of State.

Nearly 300 companies will be on hand to exhibit their cybersecurity solutions.

The event is closed to the public. The six-day event, which starts Saturday, includes four days of technical training in topics such as digital forensics, advanced hardware and infrastructure hacking. More than 70 courses will be offered. The final two days on Wednesday and Thursday will feature briefings on a range of issues like phishing and threats to power grids.

Facebook Chief Security Officer Alex Stemos, who is responsible for protecting the social network’s 2 billion monthly active users, will deliver a keynote Wednesday highlighting how security has failed to keep pace with the importance of technology in people’s lives and how to confront that problem.

Black Hat, now in its 20th year, will for the first time focus on promoting women in the industry as a way to attract talent and help solve the labor shortage issue.

Women account for only 12 percent of security specialists, Wilson said.

“If we had as many women in the Infosec workforce as we have in other industries, it would certainly make up for a good chunk of the shortage,” Wilson said.

Growing workgap

The cybersecurity workforce gap is on pace to hit 1.8 million by 2022, a 20 percent increase over 2015, according to a June report published by the Center for Cyber Safety and Education. Cybersecurity Ventures, another industry research firm, puts the global labor gap much higher, at 3.5 million.

The gap can not be closed quickly simply by pumping out more university graduates, say headhunters. Tim Howard, a managing partner at Fortify Experts, a cybersecurity search firm based in Texas, says most of the people he places in security jobs are between their mid 30s and late 40s with many years spent in network or application development.

“Now we are at a point where the new cyberthreats are really advanced and someone out of college doesn’t have the experience to deal with them,” said Tim Howard, who will be attending Black Hat.

Howard said a security architect can earn 15 percent to 18 percent more than a standard network architect, with salaries sometimes reaching $200,000 or more.

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