http://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/archive/2014/August/Pages/CyberLaborShortageNotWhatitSeemsExpertsSay.aspx By Stew Magnuson National Defense August 2014 Businesses and government agencies are engaged in a dogfight over cyber security talent, or so the conventional thinking goes. The shortage of qualified cyber security personnel continues to cause hand-wringing inside the beltway. That is mostly still true, but the situation is more nuanced, said Alan Paller, co-founder of the CyberAces nonprofit, who also chaired a Department of Homeland Security task force on cyber job vacancies. “There is no shortage of people who can talk and write about cyber security,” he said in an interview. “The shortage is in the people who actually have the hands-on skills to quickly find the infections, get rid of them and do good incident handling. Those skills are very rare.” U.S. universities are cranking out plenty of graduates with cyber security related degrees, but they have mostly studied policy, he said. Many of those graduates aren’t getting good jobs. Faculty members don’t have real-world skills, so they are not teaching how to perform complicated tasks such as application penetration testing, advanced memory forensics or wireless hacker exploit development. […]