#BHUSA : Open Source is Key to Solving Cyber Skills Gap

At Black Hat USA in Las Vegas, Anomali threat research team manager Joakim Kennedy explained to Eleanor Dallaway why he believes the open source movement in the cybersecurity industry will help to address the skills gap.

“One way of opening up the industry to more people is to provide good free tools accessible to everyone.” The open source movement allows people “to take the toolkits and moderate them.” This, he said, is particularly relevant to teenagers and people outside of the cybersecurity industry that may have an interest in joining. “The best way to learn is to get hold of toolkits and play with them, moderate them,” he said, explaining that his own path into the industry began as a teenager, “using whatever tools were available” and self-educating himself.

Making these open source tools available “will trigger the interest of the next generation of potential employees by giving them the tools to play with for free and get their interest. We need to get more interested people into the field and there’s a high threshold to get started.” He explained this high threshold means that the paid products and tools in the industry are very expensive. “The license price is too high.”

Anomali’s Kennedy explained that when new starters are employed without industry background, “it takes a lot of training to teach them new tools and techniques.” If open source toolkits were used in university programs, that would be helpful exposure to industry candidates, and would expose them to the tools they’ll need in future roles. “Imagine having to train new employees in Microsoft Offi ..

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