During one of my "Office Hours" sessions, one leader raised the challenge of trying to develop your team.

“It’s hard enough to develop people,” they explained, “but now everyone is remote, there are no in-person classes, and we don’t have any resources.”

The security industry struggles with development

It seems we struggle with creating entry-level pathways as much as we do with developing the skills to progress in your career. Mostly, we seem to let people fumble through the process until they gain enough skills to find another job.

Under constant pressure to perform, it seems easier to just hire people with experience than figure out the right blend of training and development to help people grow, contribute and earn recognition.

Sometimes the real challenge is we’re not sure how to develop ourselves, let alone guide others through the process. But as leaders, we need to develop ourselves before we can effectively develop our team.

Development is more than training

Make no mistake, training is important. Training — whether in a classroom or on-the-job — focuses on teaching specific skills in a short period. We rely on training to build skills.

How often have you enjoyed a training class, only to get back to work the next week and realize you can’t implement anything you learned?

Even with the best of intentions, transferring the new skills into an existing environment is often overwhelming.

That’s where development kicks in.

Development is applying those skills consistently in our unique environment.

The ideal is to get a little better every day, despite the challenges that naturally get in our way. Through the development process, you gain new skills and learn how to put them to use, too.

As leaders, it’s our responsibility to elevate our teams by providing each person with the development they need to grow, contribute and earn recognition.

The challenge of development creates opportunity

As leaders, we grow by solving hard problems. For many, figuring out development is a hard, complex problem to solve.

If you’re the leader who embraces the problem of how to successfully and consistently develop their team, then you create massive value for each person and the team overall.

Growth opportunities for individuals build overall coverage and expand the capability and capacity of the team, making it even easier to connect security to business results.

As an added benefit, strong development programs stand out, making it easier to keep people and find new folks, when needed.

Miss the mark, though, and people get stagnant. Instead of expanding coverage and delivering value faster, folks leaving the team create gaps in coverage and slow down your progress.

Get started: how to develop your team

Sometimes, the easiest path is to offer people what they want. If they don’t know what they want, then design a series of varied tasks and activities. Engage them with different parts of the team (if your team is big enough), other teams, and other parts of the organization.

Consider this in three steps:

Based on each person’s path, explore situations and opportunities to help them gain the experience necessary to inform better decisions and insights.

Often, this means offering activities and tasks that create fresh problems for them to solve, increasing their value as they grow.

I enjoy offering purposeful cross-pollination/cross-training exercises to blend the team together and give everyone a chance to teach, learn, and try new things.

The challenge for most is learning to delegate to elevate. It means letting go just enough for the folks on your team to work through and solve the problems.

What about development resources?

The frustration expressed in Office Hours felt more like a lack of budgets or ways to train people, based on how we used to do it. But the reality is we don’t lack quality resources, many of them available for free or low-cost.

Development is a consistent practice, and it requires time.

Whether free or paid, the real challenge is creating the safe space, structure, and help to translate resources into practical, applied experience. Folks need time to experiment, learn from their actions, and measure their progress.

Consider ways to support your team regularly:

I like it when teams dedicate specific days and times to their development. Maybe it’ll work for you, too.

This is not only a neat thing to do, it’s precisely the purpose of leadership. Set the destination, chart the path, lead the way, and elevate people on the journey.

You don’t need resources to do this. You just need to know how to develop yourself and use what you’ve learned to develop others.

You got this.

In October’s House of Lords Science & Technology Committee session on the ongoing inquiry on People and Skills in UK Science Technology Engineering and Mathematics (STEM), Robert West, Head of Education and Skills at the CBI stated ‘upskilling and reskilling are the biggest games in town”, citing it as one of the UK Government’s missions described in the White Paper on Levelling Up. This reflection is key to understanding how the UK (and many developed nations) will address the growing skills gaps in STEM. Anecdotally and evidentially, companies are crying out for qualified staff with skills in a range of digital skills including AI (Artificial Intelligence), high performance computing (HPC), data science and cyber security. While we undoubtedly need to encourage more students to take up STEM subjects, we also need to recognise that much more could be immediately delivered through the up-skilling and re-skilling of experienced people already in the workforce.

This syllabu is particularly close to the hearts of many universities delivering education in AI which in turn requires skills in computer science, HPC and other related topics. According to the OECD Policy Observatory on AI, over 60 countries have published over 800 policy instruments related to AI, illustrating the importance of the field and the need to drive capacity to deliver AI into an ever increasing number of market sectors. It is equally clear that the most significant barrier to AI adoption is the shortage of people with AI skills and the associated skills of HPC, data science and cyber security, reflecting the need to develop new mechanisms to deliver such education to a much wider set of students. According to the 2021 Ipsos MORI report for DCMS on “Understanding the UK AI labour market: 2020”, there were over 110,000 job postings in AI and data science in 2020, with over 50% requiring a degree, most commonly in STEM subjects. In their analysis, they found that 54% of company’s AI certified had PhDs, a very high barrier to entry to an area in such high demand.

In the US, the insatiable demand for AI-related doctorates has meant that over 20% of computer science PhDs are now in AI. There are further challenges related to the dependence of AI on high performance computing, especially the architecting of massive GPU clusters. The demand for such skills has led to aggressive recruitment among companies, leading to salary inflation and high levels of staff churn. It has even led to problems in parts of academia with large numbers of academics in some universities, including Carnegie Mellon, Georgia Institute of Technology and University of Washington, choosing to make the jump to industry. Even highly successful AI research groups, producing dozens of AI PhDs every year, are barely making a dent in the demand.

One of the long-term solutions to the skills drought in AI, Data Science, HPC and related skills, is to push the education of such courses to points earlier and later in the education chain. Many universities already offer strong research degrees in AI, strong Masters courses in AI (including conversation courses for non-STEM graduates), often underpinned by knowledge of HPC, cyber and other essential skills. Some undergraduate degrees which include AI such topics, but there it stops. Introducing these complex subjects into secondary education is desirable but hard because of the complexity and breadth of courses which need to be taught. Therefore the obvious area to explore is the opportunity to provide education opportunities to people already enjoying technical careers in IT or where domain expertise in areas like healthcare, banking, energy production, etc can be augmented by the addition of these high-end skills. There are multiple challenges here, including how to compress large courses like AI into modular, flexible and immediately practical courses, ideally with some formal recognition and consistency between course providers. Online courses offer some hope but there is no substitute (yet) for face to face time with expert practitioners.

One of the critical enablers for this change is to develop stronger engagement between education providers and the companies developing and using these technologies so that courses are shaped and adapted to meet real-world needs. This is particularly important in AI because of the volume of leading-edge work originating in industry, coupled with the sheer pace and scale of commercial development in AI backed by billion-dollar budgets of the Silicon Valley supergiants. Disruptive models are starting to emerge such as Xavier Neil’s Ecole 42 teacherless peer-to-peer school for computer science, bypassing the need for academic educators completely. There is also the growing possibility of using AI to Boost education delivery in these syllabu areas, allowing courses to be personalised and adapted according to the student’s needs, experience, learning styles, etc. The time to engage with this syllabu is now and the implications of getting it right (or wrong) will have significant impact on our future societies, economies and lives.

A professional writer since 1998 with a Bachelor of Arts in journalism, John Lister ran the press department for the Plain English Campaign until 2005. He then worked as a freelance writer with credits including national newspapers, magazines and online work. He specializes in technology and communications.

December 01, 2022, 04:49 PM EST

Kris Hagerman says his security firm is picking up some business due to customers’ concerns over the proposed Broadcom-VMware merger.

Sophos chief executive Kris Hagerman says his British security company is picking up new business from VMware customers nervous about Broadcom’s proposed $61 billion takeover of VMware.

In a latest interview with CRN, Hagerman said Broadcom, the semiconductor heavyweight now branching out into other tech fields, appears to be following the same customer and channel strategies with VMware that it used after its often-criticized takeover of Symantec’s enterprise business for more $10.7 billion in 2019.

Asked by CRN during a latest interview whether he saw an opportunity for Sophos to nab some VMware customers and partners due to the proposed merger, which includes the VMware Carbon Black security solutions, Hagerman replied, “Well, of course.”

He added: “The reality is we saw the same thing with Broadcom’s acquisition of Symantec. And I think this is a stated strategy of a Broadcom. That they really only focus on their top 500 to 1,000 customers. And as a result, they essentially step back almost entirely from the channel — and you’ve seen that in spades with Symantec and the acquisition of Symantec.”

He said smaller customers will be impacted along with partners as a result of any merger.

“They (at Broadcom) also essentially step back from almost all of their customers if they’re not in the top 500 or 1.000. And, as a result, it ends up opening up opportunities for all sorts of other vendors, including Sophos.”

Asked what VMware customers and partners were telling Sophos, Hagerman said: “They’re saying exactly the same thing that all those Symantec customers and partners said. There’s just exactly the same movie playing over. It’s literally the same game plan being applied to a new acquisition.”

He added: “So all those partners and customers, they just say, ‘OK, yeah, it‘s very obvious what’s going to happen. The same thing that happened with the Symantec products and partners and customers. The same thing is going to happen with VMware and the same thing is going to happen with the Carbon Black component underneath VMware.’”

Hagerman is not the only tech CEO to say that VMware customers and partners are reaching out to other vendors following Broadcom’s announcement last spring that it planned to buy VMWare.

At The Channel Company’s Best of Breed conference in Atlanta earlier this year, CrowdStrike chief executive George Kurtz said his cybersecurity company is fielding inquiries from a number of VMware customers concerned about the proposed Broadcom-VMware merger.

Since last spring’s merger announcement, Broadcom and VMware officials have aggressively pushed back at the notion that a VMware takeover will merely be a repeat of the budget cuts and price increases that happened after past Broadcom acquisitions.

Asked by CRN for a response to Hagerman’s comments, a Broadcom spokesman pointed to two latest posts, one on Wednesday and the other last month, by Broadcom president and CEO Hock Tan.

In his post earlier this week, Tan addressed frequently expressed fears that Broadcom plans to raise prices for VMware products after the proposed merger goes through, assuming it gets final regulatory approvals.

“I’ve continued to see questions in press reports about whether we intend to raise prices on VMware products. The answer is simple: No,” Tan said in his post.

He also asserted that all customers will be treated fairly.

“Following the transaction’s close, we’re going to focus on making VMware’s products better for all of our customers, including enterprise customers who want products that are even easier to use. And, to be clear, we intend to continue serving customers of all sizes,” he said in the Nov. 30 post.

Tan added: “VMware has a robust partner ecosystem that we will build upon to help us serve even the smallest companies. In short, we plan to take a ‘no customer left behind’ approach.”

Worth Davis, senior vice president at Calian IT & Cyber Solutions, an Ottawa, Ontario-based solutions provider, said most partners assume VMware products will cost more after a merger with Broadcom.

“They know what’s coming. They know prices will increase,” he said.

Davis, whose firm is a VMware partner, said many customers and partners may talk about switching to new vendors, but he said it’s easier said than done. “It’s difficult to get out of a technical architecture decision.”

He said he’s not abandoning VMware products because they offer “critical technology.”

He added he wouldn’t be surprised if Broadcom ended up focusing on VMware’s top 500 to 1,000 customers. “It’s something everyone does,” he said.

Avery Martin holds a Bachelor of Music in opera performance and a Bachelor of Arts in East Asian studies. As a professional writer, she has written for Education.com, Samsung and IBM. Martin contributed English translations for a collection of Japanese poems by Misuzu Kaneko. She has worked as an educator in Japan, and she runs a private voice studio out of her home. She writes about education, music and travel.

State-sponsored actors in the Billbug group (aka Lotus Blossom and Thrip) have tried to compromise a digital certificate authority in an Asian country during a campaign targeting multiple government agencies.

Security researchers from Symantec have made the discovery and shared the findings in an advisory published earlier today.

“In activity documented by Symantec in 2019, we detailed how the group was using a backdoor known as Hannotog and another backdoor known as Sagerunex. Both these tools were also seen in this more latest activity,” reads the technical write-up.

The company added that all the victims in this latest Billbug campaign were based in various countries in Asia.

“Billbug is known to focus on targets in Asian countries. In at least one of the government victims, a large number of machines on the network were compromised by the attackers,” Symantec explained.

According to the security firm, the targeting of a certificate authority is notable. If the attackers could compromise it and access certificates, they could use them to sign malware with a valid certificate and help it avoid detection on victim machines. It could also use compromised certificates to intercept HTTPS traffic.

“However, although this is a possible motivation for targeting a certificate authority, Symantec has seen no evidence to suggest they were successful in compromising digital certificates,” wrote the company.

In terms of how the attacks were executed, Billbug was observed exploiting public-facing applications to gain initial access to victim networks and, in particular, dual-use tools. These included AdFind, WinRAR and Port Scanner, among others.

“Multiple files that are believed to be loaders for the Hannotog backdoor were spotted on victim machines,” Symantec wrote. “A backdoor was then deployed on the compromised system. This backdoor has multiple functionalities.”

Among its various capabilities, the backdoor could create a service for persistence, stop other services and upload encrypted data.

Symantec confirmed it had notified the certificate authority to inform them of this activity. The advisory comes two months after Interpol claimed to have dismantled an international cybercrime ring that made an estimated $47,000 from extorting dozens of victims in Asia.

Symantec Corp. in alliance with Deloitte announced today an innovative cyber threat vulnerability management service. The integrated offering will pair Symantec’s cyber intelligence and information protection technologies with Deloitte’s consulting services to help businesses address concerns around cyber security and information protection. The alliance will focus on growth markets across EMEA, including Middle East as a priority region given it is a hub of targeted cyber crime activity.

The emergence of sophisticated cyber threats has resulted in the need for managed cyber security services that can help protect organizations and their assets from round-the-clock attacks. The impact following a data breach or security threat can have major consequences, damaging a business and brand reputation overnight. The unprecedented growth in digital communications, fuelled by the rise of mobile devices has made information management top of the agenda for today’s C-level executives. The latest cyber security technologies, training, skills and management all require ongoing investment that can be expensive and a drain on business resources. Symantec and Deloitte’s alliance will enable companies to outsource their cyber security to experts in the field for both technology and consulting services.

As part of the alliance, Deloitte’s enterprise risk services will be powered by Symantec Data Loss Prevention (DLP) and Managed Security Services (MSS) technologies. The services are managed by Deloitte consultants who will oversee the data lifecycle for the customer, offering a resilient incident management and response program. Threat alerts are remotely monitored and analysed via Deloitte’s Cyber Intelligence Centers, housing a full scale team of incident response experts and ethical hackers. The Cyber Intelligence Centers’ build bespoke risk profiles and in the process, effectively develop an efficient and customized security operations center for a business.

Commenting on the announcement, Amer Chebaro, Symantec’s Regional Manager for Gulf & Levant, said: “In Deloitte, we have a trusted alliance associate that can deliver against the volatile world in which they operate. The Middle East region has witnessed an upsurge in cybercrime activity, with attacks on financial and oil and gas industries making headlines across the globe and leaving some organizations exposed. The alliance enables clients to build a swift security response team that can be fully operational in hours.”

Providing greater visibility into the global cyber threat landscape offers customers peace of mind in the protection of their data. In the event of a security attack, a single point of contact to an expert is available as part of a global team offering broad-ranging crisis management capabilities.

“Current security models are minimally effective against cyber criminals, the key to addressing these risks starts by recognising that cyber threats are in fact not a technology problem but rather a business risk with strategic implications”, said Fadi Mutlak, partner in charge of Cyber Risk Services in Deloitte Middle East. He added: “Outsourcing the security operations to highly skilled consultants can allow clients to remain confident they are kept safe with best-in-class technologies and people. We are excited to work closely with Symantec and bring the two brands side-by side to deliver a unique service to the market.”

In this article:

It used to be really expensive to outfit your house with a state-of-the-art security system, but nowadays almost everyone can afford to keep their home safe with the best home security cameras on the market. There are plenty of different models to choose from, including smart home security cameras that can send you alerts and stream live videos when motion is detected. There are also plenty of budget-friendly models, and some feature weatherproof design so you can use them both inside and outdoors. 

With so many options on the market -- indoor, outdoor, wireless, DIY -- it can feel daunting to find a perfect match for the camera system you have in mind. But we're here to help you find the best device for the job. We've rounded up some of the best indoor and outdoor security cameras on the market right now so you can get some extra protection at a good value. And it's the perfect time to look for a new home security camera. You can find early Black Friday deals going on now.

We've tested dozens of home security cameras and condensed everything we've learned into this best home security camera list. Below, you'll find the best home security camera for your home in every major subcategory, from smart doorbells to the models that work well with Google Assistant, Amazon Alexa and Siri voice commands. Some are fairly simple, with a motion sensor that sends a push notification to your smartphone when they detect movement, while others come with features such as professional monitoring and cloud storage that prevent you from having to sift through hours of footage. 

If you're looking for the best home security camera system, get ready to dive in. We'll update this best home security camera list periodically. 

If you want to read more about our review process, check out our in-depth article on how we test home security cameras and video doorbells.

When you're installing wireless home security cameras, keep in mind that the smart home camera you buy (and your security system as a whole) will only be as good as the quality of your Wi-Fi connection at the location where you plan to install it. So check your Wi-Fi speed before you drill holes in the walls or otherwise mess up your door frame, brick or siding for your home security camera. If the connection is spotty on your wireless security camera, you'll notice significant lag times, pixelation in the live feed and other Wi-Fi delays that make the video quality poor and home security cameras a pain to use.

With a good Wi-Fi connection, you should be in good shape to use your indoor home security camera or outdoor home security camera without any major camera system issues and get clear footage every time. Still have questions? Take a look at my home security camera buying guide.

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