According to cybersecurityventures.com, “Over an eight-year period tracked by Cybersecurity Ventures, the number of unfilled cybersecurity jobs grew by 350 percent, from one million positions in 2013 to 3.5 million in 2021.” As the cybersecurity industry rallies to make up for this deficit in talent, high schools are joining forces to inform their students about the cybersecurity field, in the hopes that those interested have an avenue to acquiring a career in cybersecurity.
At the beginning of October, Cybersecurity Awareness Month, CornCon is held to enhance cybersecurity knowledge in the Quad Cities. CornCon is a Quad Cities parody of ‘DefCon’, an annual cybersecurity conference in Las Vegas that is famous among those in the cybersecurity world. There, a world of knowledge is brought together about cybersecurity and hacking, from presentations, to vendors, to the famous hacking competitions where world-class hackers compete to solve cybersecurity-related problems in a Jeopardy! format.
The event is so famous and so full of knowledge, that huge companies will challenge hackers to take on their equipment for a prize so that vulnerabilities can be caught in important systems before they are released to the world. In fact, in 2020, a software hacking team called PFS won $50,000 for hacking into a Department of Defense satellite that was orbiting the earth.
CornCon is a three day event that, similar to DEFCON, has “speakers who are well renowned in the cybersecurity field, vendors looking for employees and/or promoting their services in cyber security, workshops/stations to experience parts of IT / cybersecurity, and networking to know more people in cybersecurity / IT,” according to Jason Landa, the main coding instructor at PV. Landa recently took some PV students to the high school event at CornCon on November 29.
The dedicated high school event on the Friday of the three-day conference, the event-holders focus on the next generation of possible cybersecurity experts and look to inform the students who attend from surrounding high schools about the possible career opportunities, as well as answer their questions.
Troy Tomson, a PV student whose team won the high school cybersecurity challenge at CornCon, first became interested in cybersecurity “when [he] followed a few YouTube tutorials on things like making a USB rubber ducky [a hacking device that looks identical to a USB flash drive].” Last year, he competed in the Iowa State high school Cyber Defense Competition, where teams learn about cybersecurity measures and then go to an event where they compete to defend their systems from professional hackers.
It is enthusiasts like Tomson that the cybersecurity field needs. Just last year, the record for the largest ransomware attack was set at $40 million. Ransomware is a technique of stealing data and releasing it back to a victim for a price. These attacks do not only lose companies’ money, but have consequences on others not directly related to the company. In the same article, a hack of Colonial Pipeline, the “US’s biggest refined products pipeline” caused “gas shortages across the East Coast.”
With needs like these on the rise, interest has stirred at PV surrounding the creation of a cybersecurity-related course . Landa said, “I think PV would benefit from having such a course, and put PV students ahead of the game in options for jobs that some schools aren’t even thinking about yet.” As the world continues to become more and more reliant on technology, companies will either need to evolve to meet cyber threats or stand to lose to their competitors because of something unrelated to their industry or business.
