The how and the why of cyber security innovation

Currently security professionals are struggling with at least three problems. They are facing a big shortage of qualified people to fill the growing number of vacancies in their workforce. They are facing the need to secure a growing attack surface, mostly due to a longer supply chain. And the third problem they are facing is the growing sophistication of the attacks and threats.

One of the strategies any security leader needs to consider is taking a leading role in driving innovation in the security solution space. Next to explaining the ‘why’, I will also provide some suggestions for ‘how’ to do this and call out some essential succes factors. And I will show a succesful implementation.

The hacker mindset

To adress the first problem we should look at the hacker mindset. To attrack people to the cybersecurity field, we need to understand what are the characteristics of people that would be interested to do so and what would make them happy and succesful teammembers.

A simple search on wikipedia yields the following definition of the hacker culture, which in my experience is very true:

The hacker culture is a subculture of individuals who enjoy – often in collective effort – the intellectual challenge of creatively overcoming the limitations of…