An Information Security Place

WARNING: This may be a bit of a ramble.

I am a member of a Yahoo email discussion group for security professionals. One of the comments made today was about a man taking his son to an IT conference to see if he could get his son to “swear off IT as a career.” Though amusing, I am sure the gentleman was fairly serious about his statement. And though my children are too young to start thinking about a career, it made me wonder about the state of the IT industry in general and the security industry specifically and what those will look like in 20 or so years when my kids start getting out of college and enter the workforce.

Let’s look at kids today compared to when I was a kid. I regret that I did not get into technology when I was young. Honestly, I was introduced to computers at a fairly young age compared to most back then. I played with an OLD IBM (don’t remember the model number) back in fifth grade that one of my teachers owned and brought to class (she was a visionary). But it would have been great to be as deep into computers and technology as kids can get into today at a much younger age (I have a picture of my oldest son sitting in front of a computer at 2 years of age using the mouse to play a toddler game). The reason I say this is because when I was a kid, if you got into computers, you GOT INTO computers. There was no Internet. There was no plug-and-play. There was no mouse. You had to know what you were doing on a much deeper level. You knew how and why a computer worked as it did.

Most kids today take technology for granted, just like kids from my generation took TV for granted. It is there, it has always been there, and it will probably always be there. It is a part of life, and they know it like they know how to brush their teeth or put on their shoes. And taking technology for granted is the problem. A friend of mine commented recently that kids were so much more security savvy than we were back in the day. But his tone and the context showed that he was making an offhanded comment rather than stating a fact. Basically, he assumed that kids knew more because they always had computers around. I made the comment that having technology does NOT mean that kids look at things in a more secure-minded way. In fact, I argued that the opposite is more the case. They don’t always know that there is a problem with getting online and sharing information. Many kids just view it as a way to talk with their friends and play games. They probably aren’t aware that there are a bunch of bugs and security flaws in their OS, so patching is not a foregone conclusion by any means. The average kid isn’t aware of botnets and keyloggers and other types of malware beyond your basic virus or worm. Most computers come with a 90-day trial of AV software, but how many buy the new stuff and update it?

So, should kids today look at IT as a viable career path? Yes, of course. If you put a kid today who is computer-savvy against a kid of my era who was computer-savvy, the average kid of my day would almost always beat the average kid of today. But there are exceptions to that rule. I have met some “kids” online via blogging that are “on-the-ball” big time when it comes to computer and Internet security. But they don’t take the technology for granted. They are of the same breed as those kids from my day. They want to know the how and why. I hope they continue down that path, and I pray there are more of these kids out there that will help us move along in IT and security.

Now, having said all of that depressing stuff, what do I think about my kids getting into the field? The difference I see between my children and today’s children is that the IT industry will probably be a completely different field in 20 years. I see us on the verge of some crazy discoveries in technology. These are developments that may revolutionize the industry to such a point that IT will really be something completely different than today. And because this is where technology is going, kids today can get on the ground floor and be at essentially the same point that my generation was when technology started making crazy leaps and jumps. I think it will be new and refreshing and will resemble what we went through in our generation.  I am excited about my kids getting into IT in the future.

But we need our kids to want to know why and how. Every generation has its visionaries, but they just aren’t there in the numbers they used to be, and their visions are different.   The young people I see today are still every bit as smart as they were back then.  But they seem to be limited to filling gaps instead of breaking ground. Everything new is productized, packaged, and sold. There are a lot of young, smart entrepreneurs who build a company around a point product and sell it off, then start again. These types of people and products have their place in our society and economy. But they are not the old-type visionaries. We need to come alive again.

Vet