038. Importance of Journalism in Cybersecurity with Steve Morgan, Founder of Cybersecurity Ventures and Editor-in-Chief at Cybercrime Magazine

And so far as people getting involved with our field, you don't need a master's degree, you don't need a bachelor's degree, you don't need a two-year degree. Not that there's anything wrong with any of those. I'm a big believer in education and in all of that. But there's also a lot of amazing boot camp programs and certification programs that are available to everybody. And I think that's really important. I think anybody who's in college or in high school thinking ahead about cyber should know about that and unfortunately, way too many of them don't. Hello and welcome to Cyberchats, a podcast made by the National Cryptologic Foundation. I'm your host, Kennedy Taylor. And together we'll be demystifying the world of cyber security by talking with amazing cyber-finatic and professionals like you. Be sure to like and subscribe to our podcast on whatever platform you're listening on. Hi cyberchats. Today I'm thrilled to introduce a special guest. We have Steve Morgan, researcher, journalist and publisher. Steve is a founder of Cybersecurity Ventures, editor-in-chief at Cybercrime Magazine and executive producer at Cybercrime Radio. Very impressive. Steve, how are you doing today? Great. Thanks for having me on Kennedy. No, thank you for joining us. And I do want to mention that you're also named a top 10 Cybersecurity Journalist to follow in 2021. I'm going to ask you our fast five questions. You just have 10 seconds to respond. Whatever comes to your head is what we go with, okay? Okay, great. What open source tool or free application have you found valuable? O-OSP-O-W-A-S-P.org go there, great resources. A great. What would you make sure is installed or uninstalled on a friend or family members device? MFA. MFA. MFA. Multi-factor authentication. If you don't turn it on, you're crazy. One thing you wish you knew before starting in your career field. Cyber security existed. Whoa. Most I will skill you by pliding your career. Hmm. Writing. What's the most fun part of your work in Cyber? Collaborating with our team. We have a great crew here. And well, I think I might exceed 10 seconds, so I'll just leave it at that. Amazing. Those were the fast five. So how did you get here? How did your passion and journalism lead you to this role? Well, I'm not a journalist by trade. I accidentally got into the field. Although I will say that my high school English teacher told me that I should be a writer, but I found a grammar very painful and never went in that direction. But I am, I guess, career wise, a lifelong security professional. So I came from the tech side, and so all of it was just natural to me. And when I started writing, I was able to put two things I was passionate about together, and it worked that well. Why do you think journalism has been so important in Cyber? It's an opportunity to amplify important messages, get them out to really large audiences. And I've had an opportunity to do that writing for Forbes, for CSO, and then for our own media for the past number of years. Wow. I think of right now, right? I turn on the news, and it's not uncommon to find a cyber attack. Do you think what we're getting from the news outlets right now? Is that enough for do, I think, beyond cyber security professionals to all of us seem to take a step further and find an outlet like yours to find the correct information? I think we're moving in the right direction. A lot of the major broadcast analysts, excuse me, broadcast properties use material from us and some of our colleagues. So you'll find that the large cyber attacks often will reference some of the cyber media properties who go deeper. Very cool. And so I don't know if you heard, but this podcast is mainly geared to children, teenagers, college students, and even some cyber security experts. So it's really a wide age range. What would you say to someone who's interested in getting into this field? Well, I love that. I have six kids, so I personally, directly, he talked to my crew, sometimes about hacking in cyber and privacy, safety online. And we do get quite a few parents, educators, students who connect with us online, send in a lot of questions. Wow. And is that how you produce stories? Does it come from inquiries and questions? Unfortunately, or I guess fortunately, a lot of the stories come from victims. So it is sad for us to have to read through and prepare and understand what people have been through. But by sharing their stories and a lot of these people are very courageous because honestly, they have no reason to share the story other than to help other people. That is the result. And it's one thing to tell you, hey, teller, you should really turn on multifactor authentication, blah, blah, blah. That's why it sounds very technical, it's very boring. But if I explain to you how somebody else similar to you, whether it's similar in age or similar in title and what they do as a vocation, suffered a loss of a half a million dollars or a couple of million dollars and how that happened or how it happened to somebody in their family, then it really hits home. And that's what we try to do. I've learned a lot about storytelling over the last year. And yeah, it really does make a difference and help other people understand that cyber affects all of us, not just a few people. Talk to us a little bit about the process to create a story and who's involved. So we have several people on our team who do different things to pull all of this together. We have a group who exclusively works to recruit people to come on the podcast and that's very involved because we'll find stories in various media outlets and we have to contact each victim. We have to sometimes have a conversation with them to, I mean, you know, they, we're contacting them where somebody they don't know, we're sending them an email. And honestly, that's how they may have been hacked in the first place. So we have to just get past that, make a connection with them and then put them at ease, help them understand where a media outlet we're here to help. This is why we want to talk to you. And then we have to understand exactly what happened and vet that to confirm, you know, that that is the case and that we're not being scammed because a lot of people want to get media exposure. And once we go through that process, we'll then invite them on just the way you invited me on today and just open it up, hand them the mic and, you know, tell us your story. And we have content writers here who are very good at, you know, developing, you know, some questions to ask the guest and then it's a very involved process to go through the editing because, you know, people get choked up. These are difficult things for them to talk about. We've had people cry on the podcast or say things they wish they didn't. So, you know, do a little bit of editing to make sure that we're conveying what they'd like to convey as a victim before we release that. Are your content writers all cybersecurity professionals? Yes and no. No one they first join us. So we have hired people who have backgrounds in writing and, you know, some journalism, but they may not have been familiar with cyber. But yes, because they all work here. They assimilate. They learn a lot. One of our employees is signed up for the Google cybersecurity professional certificate program, not to become a cybersecurity professional, but so that they have a really good, strong working knowledge of what we're talking about. I would probably consider that to be an advantage because it's very hard sometimes to communicate cybersecurity terms or concepts to everyone, right? But by having non-siber security professionals that work for you, they can probably do that a little bit better. I think so. Some of it's informal. We have a lunch together every Friday and we always devote some portion of that time to talk cyber and get everybody involved in the dialogue, make sure they understand the stories. Very cool. And I noticed on your website that you have a very large focus on women in cyber. As a woman, I absolutely love seeing that, but you even have your own header. And I saw that you co-authored a book called 150 Fascinating Women in Cyber. Why is it important as a male to go ahead and focus on women in cyber? Well I got that answer from Ann Johnson, who's a corporate vice president at Microsoft. I had a phone conference with her because I wasn't going to write the book and I wasn't comfortable putting myself out there as you say as a man. I'm not a woman in cyber. So I felt like, well, who am I to stand up and share this? The only reason that I was on the topic is because our media was covering it. We thought it was important and I was very comfortable with that because it is such important subject matter, but not for me to be out there. But as far as Ann was concerned and some other women that we spoke to corroborated this, it was equally important for a male to talk about this. And after that feedback, I decided, okay, I'm comfortable, but I need a co-author and that has to be a woman. And it is, dive free, she's great, she's our managing editor. So it is the two of us who authored the book together. And it's critically important because right now about half or actually a little bit more, I think it's 51% to 52% of the workforce in the US. or women. So you do the math, it just doesn't make sense. We only have, you know, maybe 25% of the positions in our field filled by women. That's a mathematical challenge. So it's not just about, you know, equality and I'm a big believer in that. But it's also, hey, how do we build our workforce? We can't do it without the other half. Absolutely. I love hearing that. Thank you. And thinking about, you mentioned that you have six children, right? How I think in a digital age and especially you in this, you know, avenue of journalism and you are hearing very scary stories. How do you keep them informed and how do you prevent them from being unfortunately victims of something like that? I really, to be honest, I repurpose a lot of what I hear from other people. Sylvia Ascivito, former CEO, Girl Scouts of the USA. She wrote the forward to our book about women in cyber. She's been on a media a number of different times and I've repeated what she's shared with me to my kids because honestly, I can't quite explain it the way she can. So, you know, Sylvia talks about, you know, why is it so important to have women in cyber? She gives an example, you know, people in a subway and she explains how women can be vulnerable and she explains how men can be vulnerable and how there's a difference between those two things. And if you want to fight street crime, you have to have men, you have to have women at the table, understanding, you know, how do we protect people? How do we protect everybody? It's the same thing in cyber, but there's just not enough women who are at the table. So, you know, learned a lot from her about that and then to answer your question, kids, she's dealing with, you know, Girl Scouts hundreds of thousands of them. So, you know, she's able to break things down using the type of example I just gave you more so than highly technical examples, which are hard for a lot of young people to follow. Absolutely. And you mentioned that you will focus on education as well with Cyber Crime Magazine, is that right? Yes. As an educating on internet safety or what specifically? I'd say some of that, but probably more so, education in so far as people getting involved with our field, you don't need a master's degree, you don't need a bachelor's degree, you don't need a two-year degree. I'm a big believer in education and in all of that, but there's also a lot of amazing boot camp programs and certification programs that are available to everybody. I think anybody who's in college or in high school thinking ahead about cyber should know about that. And unfortunately, wait too many of them don't. Agreed. I feel like I get a lot of messages asking, "I'm interested in cyber. How do I get into it?" So it's great to know that this is a resource for them, for sure. Are there any boot camps or trainings off the top of your head that you would recommend for kids who are interested in getting into cyber? Well, I mentioned earlier, Google's program, and that's something that our staff is involved with. But there's a lot of programs. Every program is different. It's own pros and cons once you really research it. And those pros and cons a lot of times are tied to, "Is it online only?" Or, "Is there a classroom setting?" Because different people learn differently. Sometimes there's a course. On the one hand, maybe there's a certain certification that could be very valuable. On the other hand, maybe your budget just doesn't allow for that. And so that has to be a trade-off, but you could still get the same skill set in a different way. So I don't really want to endorse any one particular program other than the Google program simply because we're actually in it, so we could speak to that from experience. And it's very inexpensive. Well, for those listening, certainly go visit the Cybercrime Magazine website. I'm sure you'll find lots of incredible resources to take a deeper look. So thank you for that. Yeah, well, thank you. Alrighty. And in terms of your company growing, right, I see you have a podcast, you have a radio show. You have the magazine. Do you see yourself getting into TV at all on the future? Well, it's funny that you should ask because we've quietly had Cybercrime.tv, a domain name, which right now I think it forwards to a page on our site that links to our YouTube channel. But we've been working very, very hard to turn that into a reality, to have enough confidence where we could actually call it a TV experience. And I think we're getting there. We just recently exceeded 100,000. I think we have about 115,000 subscribers on our YouTube channel now. And we just received Google, I'm sorry, I'm just thinking for a second what they call it, it's the YouTube Silver Creator Award. So once you exceed the 100,000, I think there's only 0.5% of all YouTube channels have that many subscribers, you know, you get that award. So our team work really hard for it. They're really proud and I'm proud of them for helping us get there. That's incredible. And just the way you're managing to stay around, I think, I think news is becoming so different. It's all online now, but appealing to podcasts and TV. I think that's absolutely incredible. So thank you for doing that. Any of your children right now in Cyber or pursuing careers in Cyber? Yes. So Chris Morgan, same last name, he works for us full time and he recruits guests to come on the podcast. He does a great job for us. It's a lot of work. I've had two of my daughters work for us. And now they're out in their own careers. They're not in Cyber, but it was a great springboard for them. And one of them was partially responsible for the women in Cyberbook and, you know, participated in that Casey Morgan shout out to Casey. So she was great and involved with that. And then I have a son who's in school. He's a senior in college now and he's pursuing a degree in criminal justice and he's worked for us for the past two years. Wow. I like how you said springboard because I do feel like learning anything in Cyber can be extremely relevant in other fields as well. Definitely. All right. Before we go, is there anything you want to share? Anything else that I want to share? You know, I would just say this field is growing. It's huge. According to CyberSeq, this is a, you know, a government organization, but you could look it up online. CyberSeq. I think it's cyberseq.org or you could Google it. There's about a half a million jobs that are open just here in the US and our country. And we, you know, look at, you know, about three, three and a half million positions that are open globally. And sometimes people get caught up on, you know, the exact statistics don't. Let's just say there's a lot of jobs that there really are. So young people, this is a great field. I think more so than the young people, we really need to draw parents, you know, to this topic because young people look to their parents. I was asked to present a Queensborough community college. So that's part of the CUNY system in New York. And I stood up in front of 40 high school students. And we, somebody was there, you know, presenting with me and we asked them, you know, how many of you want to be a police officer? How many of you would want to be, and we went down the list of occupations architect, you know, Dr. Lawyer, Nurse, Construction Worker, what have you. And hands went up for just about every one of those occupations. And the last question was, how many of you would want to be a cybercrime fighter or a cyber security professional? One hand went up. They just didn't understand that their parents aren't talking to them about it. I don't think teachers are really talking to them about it. So I think we need not just to get young people paying attention, but we need parents and teachers paying attention so that they can get the message to the young kids. Absolutely. And I'm not chair of your involves at all with the Maryland STEM Fest. I know that they do a lot of programs throughout the year in Maryland at least, focusing on educating children on fields like cyber security. So it would be incredible to have you, I think, as a special guest to talk about. A journalism career, but also would just be a representative for cyber. Sure, I'd be happy to. Awesome. Well, thank you so much for joining. It was a pleasure to talk to you, and we will link all of your information and social media in the show notes. All right. Thank you. Really appreciate it. That's our show. Thanks for being a part of our cyber community. We can't wait to see how you do with this week's episode challenge. Visit the Cyberchats Podcast page on our website at www.cryptologicfoundation.org to find this week's challenge by Metacetia. Be sure to like and subscribe to hear more and check out the show notes for more details and link. This podcast was brought to you by the National Cryptologic Foundation, the Tiltian Foundation, and our challenge sponsor, Metacetia. you