Cybersecurity in the Army: How to Identify, Train, and Retain Future Cybersecurity Warriors

<p>Recently I had a conversation with a Signal co-worker concerning the military's cybersecurity strategy and how to get a foot in the door in the cyber career field. He was very interested in&nbsp;becoming a hacker and&nbsp;wanted to learn what&nbsp;kind of training he should focus on to stand out from the crowd. After being turned down for a reclass into a cybersecurity job he is strongly considering an ETS. This conversation epitomized to me what I think is a failure in our current plans in developing an elite cyber force.</p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>First, I think there exists a pop culture definition of hacking that creates critical misconceptions in any conversation about the subject. This misconception exists at all levels, often even amongst those that work in the field.</p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>No one can teach you to hack. It is not a skill that can be learned by rote and offered up on the platter of military training. Running a script or a program is not hacking. Typing a command into a bash shell is not hacking. Even programming a Remote Access Tool is not hacking! A hacker is simply a person that understands his/her targets' chosen technologies better than they do and can think in a critical, outside the box fashion. Skilled hackers can identify and exploit the mental scotomas of their victims, using their oversights as pivot points to open up a vast chess board with an unlimited field of movement.</p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>If you want to be a hacker you must have strong foundations in computers from the hardware to the bare bones of network technologies. Reading and digesting RFCs on various TCP/IP packets and then getting excited when you see a way to use that packet in a way no one intended is a step in the right direction.&nbsp;A hacker&nbsp;sees a program crash or a computer blue screen and wonders if its&nbsp;reproducible or causes&nbsp;buffer overflows. A hacker must be a Cisco Engineer, a Microsoft subject matter expert, a Linux guru, and a Python, Bash, PowerShell, Ruby, Java, Assembler fool. In summary, we need technologists that are passionate about IT, motivated to learn new technologies, and subject matter experts in multiple domains.</p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>1. How do you identify soldiers with exceptional&nbsp;technology skills and the aptitude to apply those skills to an asymetric task such as hacking?</p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>2. What kind of training should be used to enhance the skills of selected soldiers and prepare them for their missions?</p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>3. How do you retain those soldiers after you have invested considerable time and energy into their training?</p>