Our focus at Pythia Cyber is behavioral cybersecurity. That means we bring the best in behavioral science and organizational behavior practice to the realm of cybersecurity. We recently wrote about what it means to make the shift to a talent-based culture.  Starting out as a talent-based culture has several components, but one of the most obvious pathways is through assessing new employees for talent. As part of our mission, we have developed three assessments of cybersecurity talent -- front-line, manager, leader -- for the purpose of assessing talents related to effective cybersecurity performance. Talent assessment is entirely a 'normal course of business' in the behavioral science and organizational behavior realms. An organization that tests for talent has to become used to saying 'no' to candidates that it used to hire. There's nothing wrong with those people. But they lack the new talent that is required to be successful. A normal human response on the part o...

Our focus at Pythia Cyber is behavioral cybersecurity. We bring the best in behavioral science and organizational behavior practice to the realm of cybersecurity. As part of the mission, we have developed three assessments of cybersecurity talent -- front-line, manager, leader -- for the purpose of assessing talents related to effective cybersecurity performance. Talent assessment is entirely a 'normal course of business' in the behavioral science and organizational behavior realms. Using a pre-hire assessment process means that you will find that some people have talent, maybe a lot of it, to be effective in these roles. There will also be people who score low on these assessments. Cybersecurity is a technologist domain. Talent assessment is a behavioral science domain. These are different domains, and that creates a need to create dialog and bridges between the two domains to capitalize on the synergy to be gained through their overlap.  First let's ask why we wish to cre...

This is the fourth of four related articles. The others are here: one  |  two  |  three  | four. Pythia Cyber was formed to seek a very particular Holy Grail: improving cybersecurity by combining behavioral science with information technology. It was clear to us that human behavior plays a huge role in cybersecurity failures and therefore deserves a large percentage of the time, energy and focus that the technology gets. Changing individual habits is hard. Changing organizational culture is exponentially harder. One effective way to change culture is through hiring. The problem is that hiring can be effective in either degrading or upgrading your culture, which is why hiring is so fraught. The problem isn't just hiring though: new people need to be integrated into your team and then kept engaged. Internally, we call these three phases Find, Manage and Retain but we bow to convention and call them externally "Talent Acquisition & Upskilling" (TAU for short). ...

This is the third of four related articles. The others are here: one  |  two  |  t hree |  four . Pythia Cyber was formed to seek a very particular Holy Grail: improving cybersecurity by combining behavioral science with information technology. It was clear to us that human behavior plays a huge role in cybersecurity failures and therefore deserves a large percentage of the time, energy and focus that the technology gets. Changing individual habits is hard. Changing organizational culture is exponentially harder. One effective way to change culture is through hiring. The problem is that hiring can be effective in either degrading or upgrading your culture, which is why hiring is so fraught. The problem isn't just hiring though: new people need to be integrated into your team and then kept engaged. Internally, we call these three phases Find, Manage and Retain but we bow to convention and call them externally "Talent Acquisition & Upskilling" (TAU for sh...

This is the second of four related articles. The others are here: one  | two |  three |   four . Pythia Cyber was formed to seek a very particular Holy Grail: improving cybersecurity by combining behavioral science with information technology. It was clear to us that human behavior plays a huge role in cybersecurity failures and therefore deserves a large percentage of the time, energy and focus that the technology gets. Changing individual habits is hard. Changing organizational culture is exponentially harder. One effective way to change culture is through hiring. The problem is that hiring can be effective in either degrading or upgrading your culture, which is why hiring is so fraught. The problem isn't just hiring though: new people need to be integrated into your team and then kept engaged. Internally, we call these three phases Find, Manage and Retain but we bow to convention and call them externally "Talent Acquisition & Upskilling" (TAU for short). In o...

This is the first of four related articles. The others   The others are here: one |  two  | three  | four . Pythia Cyber was formed to seek a very particular Holy Grail: improving cybersecurity by combining behavioral science with information technology. It was clear to us that human behavior plays a huge role in cybersecurity failures and therefore deserves a large percentage of the time, energy and focus that the technology gets. Alas, aside from scolding users about clicking on links in emails (which is sadly an important function these days) we see precious little attention being paid to human behavior in the typical corporate cybersecurity program. We know this because we have looked: we have trained an AI to analyze public statements about cybersecurity to see what management claims to focus on. We can see why it is tempting to assume that by "human behavior" we mean "those naive users who don't understand the threat environment." I too prefer to assume th...