The Advantages of Women in Technology

CYBR650 - Week 10

"When you put the helmet on, it doesn't matter if you are woman or man: your mission is to compete to win.  The important thing is your ability, your intelligence and your determination." 
Milka Duno, race car driver

“Recognize and embrace your uniqueness.  I don’t think the ratios are going to change anytime soon.  But I don’t think it has to be a disadvantage.  Being a black woman, being a woman in general, on a team of all men, means that you are going to have a unique voice.  It’s important to embrace that.”
 Erin Teague, Yahoo director of Product Management

While 57 percent of occupations in the workforce are held by women, in computing occupations that figure is only 25 percent.  This disparity is apparently getting worse, as fewer women are graduating from college with computer science degrees than there were in the 1980’s.  What is the impact of fewer women in technology jobs? 

Women are needed in technology fields

Current research indicates gender diversity has many benefits.  Diverse teams –not all male or all female -- tend to be more productive and have better team dynamics.  Interestingly, technology work teams stay on schedule and under budget when they are gender diverse.  These teams are more likely to experiment, are more likely to share knowledge and to complete tasks.  On the organizational level, when diversity is actively encouraged and facilitated in the workplace, it’s beneficial, but if ignored, there are more communication issues and weaker cohesion in work teams.

Time magazine reported that the gender gap in cybersecurity makes everyone less safe.  This is partly driven by the fact that there are fewer people available to work in cybersecurity when only half of the population are seeking jobs in the field.  Women only comprise 10 percent of the information security workforce.  Another significant factor is that security solutions aren’t developed with half the population in mind.  Since women experience the world differently, they also come up with different solutions to security issues.  In general, women are more sensitive to privacy issues than men, most likely because they are more affected by attacks on privacy.  One factor in this disparity could be due to the military and industrial roots of the field.  Terminology such as 'cyberwar' tend to discourage women from being interested. 

So what can be done to improve the situation?  Time suggests cybersecurity job postings should emphasize communal, mission oriented, human-centered impact, instead of corporate mission and defense.  But women need to be interested and trained long before the job posting.  Audrey MacLean, former CEO and financier for numerous successful tech start-ups, says the key is to interest girls in computing in grade school, with games that don’t involve violence, but offer challenges they find interesting.  My own experience with a daughter who became an industrial engineer, is that she found the teamwork, problem solving and product development interesting during college and loves the data analysis work she’s doing now.  But what peaked her interest in middle school, was a Disney website that discussed careers for their amusement parks. 

Whatever the solution, it may be too late for the technology demands in the next 10 to 15 years.  The tech sector is already short on college graduates who can fill IT jobs.  

Watson Applies Machine Learning to Cybersecurity

CYBR650 - Week 9

By learning you will teach, by teaching you will learn. – Latin Proverb

I'm working on artificial intelligence. Actually, natural language understanding, which is to get computers to understand the meaning of documents. -- Ray Kurzweil, computer scientist and futurist

IBM announced earlier this week that they were beginning a new year-long cybersecurity initiative with eight North American Universities.  These universities all have strong cybersecurity programs.  The university students will be working to train and then analyze security data for trends using IBM’s Watson technology platform. 

http://www.wallpaperhd.pk/machine-learning-smart-brain-wallpaper/

IBM’s Watson is a cognitive computing system and former Jeopardy champion.  Watson uses machine learning to extrapolate patterns from large data sets.  The process is to allow the computer to learn from unstructured data, then to make predictions based on its programming, then repeat the process.  This produces reliable, repeatable results.  It’s very similar to artificial intelligence.  Machine learning uses large amounts of unstructured data (in this case, on a specific topic) and makes predictions, tests them against the data and then modifies the algorithm and repeats the “learning” process again.  As new data is added, the system adjusts.  This is one of the methods Google used to program its self-driving car.  The Google car used machine learning to understand how other vehicles behave on the road with 70,000 miles of driving data.  Recording how other drivers and different types of vehicles respond to slow vehicles, obstructions in the road and other situations.  The car learns from others and from its own actions and constantly adjusts the rules that it uses to drive.  The more the car drives in an area, the better it does.

In the case of Watson’s cybersecurity machine learning, the students will train Watson by feeding large amounts of security reports, and other unstructured data.  This includes IBM’s X-Force research library which contains 100,000 documented vulnerabilities.  Watson uses natural language processing to read blog posts, news reports and other information.  The expectation is that Watson for Cybersecurity will reveal emerging threats and how to deal with them.

The project won’t start until fall of this year, so we don’t know if this will revolutionize cybersecurity, but IBM believes this will strengthen the case for Watson’s cognitive computing as a serious business platform.  It may also help with the skills gap of training new cyber professionals.  

Security Trends by Generation

Cyber650 Week 8

Age is a high price to pay for maturity.  Tom Stoppard

Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.   George Orwell

One of those things that I’ve been wondering about lately is the differences in the generations,

demographic groups of people who share common characteristics. The chart gives one breakdown of the currently accepted generation titles and age ranges.  It isn’t news to anyone, that young and old view the Internet differently.  But if we look behind the curtain, there are some interesting differences in how people of different generations view security, online safety and their willingness to buy stuff online. 

I recently stumbled across an online report by a commercial VPN provider who offers a application based service to protect privacy, increase security and hide your location from others on the Internet.  The report, called The Dangers of Our Digital Lives, discusses the apparent disconnect between our attitudes and actions regarding online security.  I would expect that older people would be less trusting and therefore more cautious online.  On the other end of the spectrum, young people would care less about privacy, since they’ve grown up sharing too much information (at least in my opinion) on social media sites.  Of course, the report is biased toward getting people to use their service, but some interesting details come out.  I’ll summarize a few I found interesting here.

- The most secure are those who’ve experienced a security problem.  They improve their security posture by using two-factor authentication, password managers (and probably stronger passwords) and security layers (encryption, two-factor authentication, anonymizers and VPN’s). 

- Two thirds said they want extra layers of security, but very few actually use the tools that are available. 

- Two thirds shred their personal documents, but many post email addresses, home addresses and phone numbers online.

- Sixty percent post inaccurate information on social media as a safety precaution.

So how does age fit into this data?  Does age matter for good security decisions?  According to Kevin Murname, in his Forbes blog about boomers and privacy, baby boomers are the most likely go online daily (93%).  Murname says this is because they spent so much time using PC’s.  He points out the big names in creating the technology behind the Internet are all boomers.  They’re also least likely to use social media.  They’re the least likely to feel safe online.  Older generations like the Internet a lot less. 

So how do the first adopters of the Internet protect themselves?  They tend toward older technology protections such as encryption and anti-virus software and less likely to use two-factor authentication.  Oddly, the millennials felt more protected and reported the most security incidents. 

Just a few more statistics.  In general, most Americans have strong opinions about privacy and confidentiality.  According to a 2015 Pew Research Center report, the majority feel they should be able to maintain privacy about their personal lives.  Ninety three percent say it’s important to control who can get information about them.  Only six percent are confident the government can protect their records.

I’m at the tail end of the baby boomer generation, born in 1960, and I only partially fit demographic.  I took the online quiz that they offer to see what my security profile is and I came up “digitally enlightened.”   Most likely because I’m studying cybersecurity, I take more precautions than most to protect myself. 

What do you do to protect yourself?