13 Mar The $10 Trillion Question: Can America’s Cyber Czar Shrink The Skills Gap?
This week in cybersecurity from the editors at Cybercrime Magazine
Sausalito, Calif. – Mar. 13, 2025
In Apr. 2019, Kristi Noem, Governor of South Dakota at the time, and now U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security (DHS), wrote that “the cost of cyberattacks is climbing, and the vulnerability of businesses to attacks is on the rise,” and that “by 2021, there will be 3.5 million unfilled cybersecurity jobs around the world, according to Cybersecurity Ventures.”
That came to pass in 2021, and as of 2025, the same number of positions remain open. Nearly 460,000 of those positions are in the U.S., according to CyberSeek, a project supported by NICE, a program of the National Institute of Standards and Technology in the U.S. Department of Commerce. The lack of skilled cyber fighters exacerbates the cost of cybercrime.
On Mar. 11, 2025, President Donald Trump formally nominated Sean Plankey to serve as director of CISA, America’s Cyber Defense Agency. He brings deep technical and leadership experience gleaned from the military and private sector, together with federal cybersecurity expertise.
The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) is a component of the DHS responsible for cybersecurity and infrastructure protection across all levels of government, coordinating cybersecurity programs with U.S. states, and improving the government’s cybersecurity protections against private and nation-state hackers.
Cybersecurity Ventures predicts that in 2025, cybercrime will cost the world $10.5 trillion annually, which CISA’s Cybersecurity Advisory Committee previously shared.
Plankey will require Senate confirmation to assume leadership of CISA. Then the $10 trillion question is … “Can America’s Cyber Czar Shrink The Skills Gap? With Noem at the helm of DHS, it is a likely possibility.
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