Your Job As A Manager In A Cyber-Defender Group Is Going To Get Weirder, Soon

Your job as a manager in any organization is to keep your direct reports focused, deal with their personal issues, and appease your superiors. It can be thankless. In fact about 50% of managers fail, so it can also lead to joblessness. 

All that for what is probably a few pennies more an hour in your paycheck compared to what you made as a front-line cyber-defender.

Oh hey it's also going to get weirder soon.

As we just published in yesterday's Litany of the Hacked, you can now expect not only gangs of humans to hack you but also gangs of AI models (that are "behaving in unexpected and concerning ways" -- see yesterday's post) and gangs backed by nation-states.

But surely, you know, there are laws about this that will help.

Well, no. In an uncomfortable piece in the NY Times this week, there is no governmental regulation coming from anywhere to rein in the aggressiveness of AI models. China? Nope. EU? Nope. US? Nope. There are laws regarding people who are hackers but not for bots who are hackers.

As a manager it's not at your pay grade to change any of this. You need to keep your people focused and prepared. 

In days of yore, like 10 years ago, you needed out-sized technical chops. Then during the COVID-19 pandemic & soon after it was all about communication and consideration and flexibility. As we move forward you're going to need to manage engagement actively while you manage performance. Why? Because back then you had to act like a manager doing routine management things, and now your adversaries using AI will up the op tempo all along your security surface. That's not in the "routine management things" playbook because, much as with government regulations, the playbooks are obsolete before they are published. That's the nature of the vicious virtuous cycle of AI innovation.

When was the last time you had a team discussion about AI and cyber-defense? What about a system to develop AI 'badges' for continual development? Do you do "token-maxxing" because, um, that's what you do, or have you worked through to developing a system to manage token economies within your SOC? How do you develop those new hires you need?

All of this is predicated on you upgrading your own management competence. There is no substitute for anticipating the need to evolve.

Ask us how you can develop your management competence in an AI-focused SOC.

(image credit: Chris 73 / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=73899)