Catch up on stories from the past week (and beyond) at the Slashdot story archive

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×
Security United States

DHS Adds Hundreds of New Cyber Professionals To Its Ranks (therecord.media) 46

The US Department of Homeland Security on Thursday announced that it is onboarding nearly 300 cybersecurity professionals and has extended job offers to 500 others in what it refers to as "the most successful cybersecurity hiring initiative in DHS history." From a report: The hiring spree is part of the department's 60-day cybersecurity workforce sprint that aimed to add 200 new cybersecurity personnel by July 1. As The Record reported in May, DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas told attendees of a US Chamber of Commerce event that one of the department's most significant priorities was building out its cybersecurity expertise with an emphasis on diversity.
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

DHS Adds Hundreds of New Cyber Professionals To Its Ranks

Comments Filter:
  • "Onboarding"? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by sgage ( 109086 ) on Friday July 02, 2021 @04:28PM (#61545518)

    For godz sake, don't use 'onboarding' when you mean 'hiring'. Just another disgusting corporate-speak torturing of the language to sound cool, or modern, or whatever. Yuck, yuck, and yuck!

    • Re:"Onboarding"? (Score:4, Informative)

      by cruff ( 171569 ) on Friday July 02, 2021 @04:32PM (#61545534)
      In my experience, "onboarding" is the process of bringing someone up to speed to be productive once they've been hired and they start work.
    • I was not contacted. This is a farce. A show of force made of smoke and mirrors.

      • You make too much. First we are talking about Government here. Second they want diverse bodies in seats. Having an army of professionals sure sounds good. I suppose you could call the folks that work for TSA security professionals, right? And mostly TSA finds pocket knives and other fairly harmless things. You can see where this is going already.

        • by rtb61 ( 674572 )

          They are hiring because they found contracting to be pissing in the wind, the more piss away in contracts the wetter you get and no problems solved.

          Bad tenders, producing under performing work, as contractors to cheat in every way possible to charge extra and do everything legally possibly to make sure the software does not work so that another contract is required.

          Doing it in house simply works better if you can afford full time staff and sets sound goals and monitor them properly and train them as agents

          • by rtb61 ( 674572 )

            PS they will never get the best people, pot, guarantees that wont happen and their inability to tolerate it.

            • You're right they will never get the best people because of their standards, pot being one and pay being another as a couple of examples. Whether they can be effective at much beyond theater remains to be seen.

    • For godz sake, don't use 'onboarding' when you mean 'hiring'.

      But it's a word they like to, you know, leverage...

    • For godz sake, don't use 'onboarding' when you mean 'hiring'. Just another disgusting corporate-speak torturing of the language to sound cool, or modern, or whatever. Yuck, yuck, and yuck!

      Then firing someone would be outboarding.

      • For godz sake, don't use 'onboarding' when you mean 'hiring'. Just another disgusting corporate-speak torturing of the language to sound cool, or modern, or whatever. Yuck, yuck, and yuck!

        Then firing someone would be outboarding.

        No, it would be offboarding.

  • by cayenne8 ( 626475 ) on Friday July 02, 2021 @04:33PM (#61545536) Homepage Journal

    DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas told attendees of a US Chamber of Commerce event that one of the department's most significant priorities was building out its cybersecurity expertise with an emphasis on diversity.

    Thank God they know the metrics to use to gather the best brains and computer skills for their cyber force.

    Do it based on diversity, THAT is the driving factor to success.

    Geez, what the fuck were people thinking as short as a few years ago that merit and displayed ability mattered at all?

    Yep...we'll win the world as long as we check off the right number of boxes.

    Hell the muslim countries have already lost...as that they won't have any LBGTQ4xrtXyZ....

    • DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas told attendees of a US Chamber of Commerce event that one of the department's most significant priorities was building out its cybersecurity expertise with an emphasis on diversity.

      Thank God they know the metrics to use to gather the best brains and computer skills for their cyber force.

      Do it based on diversity, THAT is the driving factor to success.

      Geez, what the fuck were people thinking as short as a few years ago that merit and displayed ability mattered at all?

      Yep...we'll win the world as long as we check off the right number of boxes.

      Hell the muslim countries have already lost...as that they won't have any LBGTQ4xrtXyZ....

      It's worse than you think. The CDC is baking equity into everything they do [msn.com], and the original vaccine recommendations addressed inequity [reason.com]. Rather than use a vaccine policy that would reduce the total deaths, the CDC noted that "older populations are whiter" (direct quote), so by emphasizing inequity more older white patients will die to help even the imbalance.

      Note: The US older population is predominantly white, but the *proportion* is still about the same as in the general population.

      • by XXongo ( 3986865 )

        Rather than use a vaccine policy that would reduce the total deaths, the CDC noted that "older populations are whiter" (direct quote),

        Did you read the article you linked? That isn't a quote from the CDC. It was a quote from Harald Schmidt, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania,

        so by emphasizing inequity more older white patients will die to help even the imbalance.

        The optimum way to distribute vaccines is to minimize transmission: That would mean, the initial doses should go to everybody who had to work because they were "essential", and everybody who deals with the public-- grocery store clerks, teachers, nurses, senior-care aides. To stop the plague, you need to reduce R0.

        That's what the article you posted was co

    • Do it based on diversity, THAT is the driving factor to success.

      Well, it worked for the Vice President of the United States, right?

      Right?

      Anyone?

      Wow. Not even feminists are speaking up now. Learn anything yet? No? I see. You're still winning like Charlie Sheen in your mind.

      Good luck with that.

      • Except the CDC said nothing about diversity. It's an article by a typical Reason type.
        • Except the CDC said nothing about diversity. It's an article by a typical Reason type.

          I'm not sure what the CDC has to do with DHS here, unless I'm confusing one of a million mil-spec acronyms.

          To put it bluntly, damn near everyone has a focus on diversity over competency. America leads by example with this. Literally. DHS would be no different with this ignorance.

    • by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

      It's ok, pride month is over so no one gives a fuck about gays any more

      Meme time:

      https://cdn.discordapp.com/att... [discordapp.com]

      https://media.discordapp.net/a... [discordapp.net]

      https://cdn.discordapp.com/att... [discordapp.com]

    • by gtall ( 79522 )

      yeah, like the previous alleged administration searched high and low for qualified people so they knew which ones not to hire. They figured that if they hired only the incompetent, then that left the private sector with the competent ones and there'd be no one on inside to use real science. They succeeded brilliantly.

    • "...one of the department's most significant priorities..." Emphasis mine.

      It seems to me to be a good place to weight diversity in with meritocracy. They aren't going to be, or need to be, or paying to be, hiring 2000 of the best. Just 2000 good cybersecurity personnel and hell, it's America, you're drowning in them. And if that means you end up with a workforce that isn't only white male straight etc... then so be it. It isn't like the current workforce had the problem under control.
      • It seems to me to be a good place to weight diversity in with meritocracy.

        I don't see where diversity comes into it at all.

        If you want the best, you hire the BEST.

        And with all the cyber problems escalating...you want the best.

        I don't care if the force were 100% half blue haired trans folks if they were the best.

        Mert is what you want, it doesn't matter if what you end up with is mixed, or majority of one of the other.

  • I never realized that "Diversity" was a critical area of information security. Sounds like Political Correctness is winning the war against the best human for the job.
  • Dawn Of A New Era (Score:4, Insightful)

    by SlashbotAgent ( 6477336 ) on Friday July 02, 2021 @04:45PM (#61545584)

    Never before have so many, done so little, for so much public money.

    That they're being selected fro racial and gender reasons makes the nonsensical waste all the more ironic.

    • Well people have been complaining about not enough women in STEM, so here's an incentive. Become a cyber-professional in a field that clearly needs them. Gotta protect those pipelines don't you know.

      • Yeah, who cares if women like STEM... Gotta push them in anyway. ... Gotta keep the actually important jobs, like teaching, childcare, healthcare, etc, valueless and disrespected... And if you don't like it, you're "brainwashed by the patriarchy".. .

        How did the feminist dream turn into "devalue all womanly interests and turn women into men"?

        And obviously I don't mean women /can't/ get into those jobs if they *want* to. Why would I not want that? My problem is with the /forcing/.

        STEM is great, and I love and

    • Never before have so many, done so little, for so much public money.

      That they're being selected fro racial and gender reasons makes the nonsensical waste all the more ironic.

      When it comes to this, America is literally leading by example.

      Sad to say, but can you really blame them?

  • "one of the department's most significant priorities was building out its cybersecurity expertise with an emphasis on diversity."

    Will “diversity” protect us better from the commie hackers :]
    • by dysmal ( 3361085 )

      If you include enough commie hackers, I would hope so!

    • Well, considering that commie hackers are apparently really good and considering that commie hackers are likely woefully underrepresented in the DHS... yeah, I think it could.

      Provided you can somehow get them to come over to the US.

    • I've been an information security professional for over 20 years.

      Yes, the big problem is lack of diversity. Sometimes when I'm trying to figure out how to write an IDS rule that will catch an attack without false positives on normal traffic, I can't do it because my penis has trouble hitting those keys on the keyboard.

      For example today I was dealing with a zero day involving the Windows print spooler. We need to alert on attack traffic, where the attack looks like trying to add a printer. Without alerting

  • DHS was designed to be a bureaucracy to manage bureaucracies, as if that would help reduce the turf wars among bureaucracies. I suspect that they're finding it difficult to manage all the paperwork, and the cyber-professionals will primarily handle that rather than serving any useful purpose.

  • What are they going to do when they have nothing to do?

  • The DOD is the largest employer on the planet. The DHS isn't even a part of the DOD. It is a separate entity. That being said we are not even looking at the periphery of other US government. The salaries of these new hires will not come from your taxes. These salaries will come from borrowing from the Federal Reserve which is how the US government funds things. Our taxes don't even cover the interests on those debts. The cyber security experts of diversity will be an additional waste product. We definitely

"In my opinion, Richard Stallman wouldn't recognise terrorism if it came up and bit him on his Internet." -- Ross M. Greenberg

Working...