UK firms need to rethink incentives to attract and retain people with cyber security skills, according to the findings of a recent global study.
UK businesses are currently the least likely to offer incentives to cyber security staff to reward them for their performance and efforts, a global report reveals.
Some 42% of UK organisations – the highest proportion globally – do not have incentives for information security professionals, according to the report by Intel Security and the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).
The report, which polled 800 infosec pros, examines the difference between the incentives available to IT professionals who defend against cyber attacks compared with the incentives for attackers.
The report suggests UK businesses can learn more from the incentives on offer to attackers, and can use this knowledge to attract, motivate and retain information security professionals more effectively.
Attracting and retaining people with cyber security skills is challenging for most companies in the face of a worldwide shortage, with 1.8 million infomation security-related roles expected to remain unfilled worldwide by 2022, according to the latest Global Information Security Workforce Study from (ISC) 2 .
“Misaligned incentives between attackers and defenders mean that the decentralised market in which cyber criminals operate makes them adapt and innovate faster and more efficiently than defenders, whose incentives are shaped by bureaucracies and top-down decision making,” said the report.
According to the report’s authors, this means companies and governments will need to rethink how they measure, reward and incentivise those working in cyber defence.
“The cyber crime market is efficient, and the incentives for cybercriminals are clear and compelling,” said the report. “The same is not true for defenders. Criminals flourish in this market, but most defenders work in bureaucracies. In most companies, cyber security is the responsibility of a diverse range of groups and individuals using different (and sometimes conflicting) metrics for success.
“Incentives are not only misaligned between attackers and defenders, but also in companies.” This indicates the need for a cultural shift in the way defenders are recognised and rewarded.

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The Visual Studio 2017 release in early March included F# 4.1 and an update of the Visual F# tools. F# 4.1 brings improvements and interoperation with C# 7 while the tools are the first version supporting the Roslyn workspaces.
The Visual Studio 2017 release in early March included F# 4.1 and an update of the Visual F# tools. F# 4.1 brings improvements and interoperation with C# 7 while the tools are the first version supporting the Roslyn workspaces.
As previously covered, F# 4.1 brings improvements and interoperation with C# 7 :
An updated version of the Visual F# tools also shipped with Visual Studio 2017. A notable addition to the tools is the support of Roslyn Workspace APIs :
IDEs such as Visual Studio use the Roslyn workspace APIs to provide multiple features. While the compiler part of Roslyn is C#/VB specific, some APIs such as the workspaces sit at a higher level and are not tied to a particular language. Thus, implementing the API means an IDE feature can support F# directly instead of needing a distinct implementation for F#. The features refactored to use Roslyn workspaces include :
The official announcement from Microsoft also acknowledges the many contributions of the F# community. Several community members were thanked for their contributions on the F# compiler, Visual F# tools and language design.

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Users of AWS’s London-hosted T2 Micro Instances suffered capacity issues on Friday 24 March.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) ran into technical difficulties on Friday 24 March, as the cloud giant seemingly struggled to keep up with the demand for London-hosted versions of its T2 Micro Instances.
Users attempting to use the service on Friday received error messages telling them the EU-West-2a availability zone in London had insufficient capacity to fulfil their orders.
Computer Weekly understands the error message began appearing for the first time on Friday for users, with several querying whether or not it means AWS is running too close to full capacity in one of its two London-based availability zones.
This hypothesis has been put forward by users who claim manually shifting their workloads from the affected availability zone to an alternative one had provided them with a temporary workaround.
In a statement, on the AWS service status page on 24 March , the company confirmed the service had run into problems, but only for users attempting to launch fresh T2 Micro Instances.
It also advised users at the time to opt for alternative T2 Instance types to run their workloads until it was able to bring on additional capacity online at around 7pm on Friday evening.
“Until capacity returns to normal levels, some customers may continue to see Insufficient Capacity Errors for new launch requests. In those cases, we continue to recommend using t2.nano, t2.small, t2.medium, t2.large or any of the other instance families,” the page stated.
“All other instance families (C4, D2, I3, M4, R4 and X1) and instances that are currently running remain unaffected. We expect t2.micro instance capacity to return to normal levels within the next hour.”
The AWS service status dashboard confirmed the problem was resolved at around 8pm.
Introduced in 2014 , the T2 Micro Instances provide AWS users with the option to purchase cloud-based compute capacity in smaller-than-usual increments, and are geared towards workloads that occasionally – rather than consistently – require high levels of central processing unit.
According to AWS, ideal use cases for the instance type include developer environments, small databases and web servers.
Computer Weekly contacted AWS for further comment on this story, but was redirected to the company’s service status page for further information.

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