What are the best ways to create a cybersecurity-focused team?

- Build a diverse and multidisciplinary team; - Encourage education and research; - Train your most junior professionals; - Create a collaborative culture between peers;

Building a robust cybersecurity team necessitates: ??Passion for Learning: Team members must possess a genuine zeal for continuous learning and a commitment to understanding business intricacies. ??Holistic Approach: Beyond system security, the team prioritizes ensuring the availability and reliability of critical processes for business continuity. ??Creative Problem-Solving: Emphasis on creative problem-solving, focusing on solutions rather than getting stuck on problems. ???Effective Communication: Strong communication skills are vital for translating technical issues into understandable insights, facilitating issue resolution, and aiding informed, risk-based decision-making within business units.

Diversity is an important component of a cybersecurity team. Threat actors come from all walks of life with diverse backgrounds. They all have unique mannerisms, behaviors, and are motivated by different reasons. They are thinking and acting in unique and diverse ways in order to plan and mount attacks against our networks, systems, and people. Having a diverse team of individuals with not only specific and diverse skills, but also with unique and diverse perspectives is critical in order to successfully hunt and defend against these threat actors.

It’s all about training and awareness. Employees are NOT the weak link they are the attack vector. Invest in your people. Focus and training on social engineering

Don't just tell them about it. I've sat through too many trainings where it's just a slide show that tells the employee to protect the company. Make it interactive, do phishing tests (either with paid services or using a spoofing service or doing it natively on the messaging apps). Make sure to test across multiple diffent mediums, too! Take extra time on those that fail, to help them understand the importance. Focus on how it isn't just a company issue, but could affect their personal, family, friends, social media accounts, bank and more. Bringing it back to how it impacts and affects them will help the message stick, and they become more likely to report issues.

Empower your cybersecurity team for innovation. Cybersecurity requires creativity to solve problems and seize opportunities. As an executive, provide your team with the autonomy and authority to make decisions. Support them with the necessary budget, infrastructure, and processes to foster innovation. Encourage experimentation and celebrate successes while learning from failures. This approach will drive your team to implement new ideas and solutions effectively.

Aligning cybersecurity capabilities with 'top line' business goals such as customer acquisition, loyalty, trust and revenue, alongside the standard 'bottom line' objectives like risk mitigation and compliance, could be a necessary paradigm shift in many settings. I recall a thought-provoking analogy from a conference. The speaker asked 'Why do you have brakes on a car?' While there were standard answers like 'to avoid accidents', the speaker's take was 'to go faster', underscoring the importance of cybersecurity in fostering a secure business environment rather than just addressing threats.

Endeavour to be an enabler, rarely is cybersecurity for the sake of cybersecuruty, understand your organisations top priorities and support those. Understand these may not align with our top priorities. But if we aim to protect our organisation in existing programmes, but also set the security ground for future projects, the team should be challenged enough to see the value in thier outputs. Creating an engaged and proactive group of professionals.

To align cybersecurity with your organization: Integrate Security in Strategy: Make cybersecurity part of your business planning. Clear Communication: Define roles and how they support company goals. Collaborate with Other Teams: Work together across departments. Promote Security Culture: Make security part of your values. Continuous Training: Keep everyone updated on cybersecurity practices. This ensures cybersecurity supports your overall mission.