A few weeks ago, my colleague, Cecilia Marinier, moderated a webcast event for Schools That Can on the topic of Building the Future of the Insurance Workforce. Cecilia and I had an interesting conversation about her blog, Circumstance & Possibility Create Opportunity. We explored these words, recognizing that opportunity is critical to building the future workforce. A lack of opportunity poses great obstacles to creating possibilities. What we realized was that tomorrow’s leaders may very well be nestled in the rural areas of the United States. That sentiment was echoed in a ZDNet article I read this week, “Cybersecurity has a desperate skills crisis. Rural America could have the answer.” It’s such a great story about creating awareness and opening doors of opportunity where there were otherwise none.

My point is, as the industry looks to narrow the skills gap, we should be leaving no stone unturned, especially if we are driven by the mission to foster diversity, equity, and inclusion. There is no one source that we should be tapping into to feed the talent pipeline. Together we can.

To learn more about closing the skills gap or other cybersecurity topics of interest, explore the variety of educational content available in our Library. Now let’s take a look at what else made industry headlines this week.

May 13: A telegram channel with more than 500 subscribers is promoting a plethora of tools and services for cybercriminals, including malware-as-a-service, according to news from Threatpost.

May 12: The Hacker News reported, “Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed a massive campaign that’s responsible for injecting malicious JavaScript code into compromised WordPress websites that redirects visitors to scam pages and other malicious websites to generate illegitimate traffic.”

May 12: Despite great efforts to create standards that work toward increased software integrity and implement zero trust strategies across government agencies, the Biden administration continues to face challenges as it works toward improving the nation’s cybersecurity posture, according to Cybersecurity Dive.

May 12: The US Justice Department “sentenced Glib Oleksandr Ivanov-Tolpintsev (28, Chernivtsi, Ukraine) to four years in federal prison for conspiring to traffic in unauthorized access devices and computer passwords.”

May 11: Managed service providers have been warned to be on guard that they are an increasing target for cyberattacks from nation-state actors, according to news from CyberScoop.

May 11: The Record reported, “A Canadian company that supplies fighter jets for airborne training exercises has been hit with a ransomware attack.”

May 10: Security researchers at Malwarebytes discovered activity likely coming from APT34, alleged Iranian actors, that was targeting government officials in Jordan.

May 10: “Britain’s cybersecurity unit has reported a record crackdown on internet scams after tackling more than 2.7m attempted frauds last year, a near-fourfold increase on the figure for 2020,” according to The Guardian.