Many folks are worried about the social trends since the introduction of social media and I think that line of concern also may provide some parallel insight into our issues with cybersecurity.

In many studies, we see that since 2013, rates of depression, anxiety, and self-harm began to rise rapidly for American adolescents. The trend for girls is more dramatic than boys. At around 2013, the incidents of poor metal health reported started to increase substantially. Why 2013? That is the year after Facebook bought Instagram. It also happens to be the year that modern cyberattacks began to evolve – ransomware, polymorphic malware, rogue APIs, XXS, MITM, Zero-Day attacks, DDoS’s, etc.

As we started on the path to creating a virtual world more attractive than the physical world in which we actually operate, our cybersecurity world began to become overwhelmingly difficult to manage.

Lacking effective responses to swarm bots, SQL injections, cross site scripting, reverse shell attack vectors, and phishing campaigns, we began amassing tools to layer one upon the other in the hope that somehow, enough of these would do the trick. They haven’t, and what they’ve done instead is to increase the complexity of our network environments to an extent impossible to deal with today.

Cybersecurity professionals began privately associating with the idea that they might not have much of a chance to be successful.

In survey after survey, American high school seniors were agreeing with the statement “People like me don’t really have much of a chance at success anymore.” And while girls’ responses trailed boys’, beginning in 2013 we began to see surveys depicting girls feeling much more pessimistic about their lives and themselves as well.

In the early phases of the technology evolution, boys began investing more and more of their time into computers, programming, and video games. When social media became popular in 2018, girls began to embrace the virtual world, suddenly spending as much time as boys interacting with computers, smartphones and other entertainment devices.

In independent studies, Millennials share many of the same rates of depression and anxiety, but came through the technological curve just before the scaled expanse of social media, so the rate of mental health issues remains lower than their counter-parts 11 years their junior.

In addition to letting these tribes interact with new devices in far more realistic renderings that at any time in the past, the new virtual world enabled them to do all of the exciting and titillating things they couldn’t do in real life.

Being the door gunner firing your 550 spm M60D machine gun as your chopper strafed and destroyed villages full of women and children in Vietnam, being your version of Rambo and parachuting into a jungle war zone where you jack your score by killing as many enemy as you choose, in whatever way you choose to do so and meeting up with virtual girl or boy friends for hours on end, advancing personal relationships designed to flatter your ego and care for your insecurities while increasingly substitute for attempts at challenging and difficult real world relationships

Boys and girls in these tribes are both in trouble. Many have withdrawn from the real world, which results in a failure to develop the skills needed to become competent, successful, and civilized men and women. Instead, they have been increasingly sampled into an ever more addictive and appealing virtual world, one in which desires for adventure and for sex can be fully satisfied, without doing anything that would prepare them for success in the real world.

And all of this withdrawal happened before the arrival of the metaverse and generative AI, which is just now finding their legs, and before the arrival of increasingly charming, attractive, and customizable AI girl and boy friends. With sites like Character.ai and Replika.com, the virtual world is becoming ever more immersive and addictive.

Every year it will lean harder on age groups up to and including GenZ which has the most serious mental health crisis of all demos combined, and Millennials, urging them to abandon the real world.

Cybersecurity Parallels

“People like me don’t really have much of a chance at success anymore.”

The parallels begin with a global cybersecurity paradigm that can be truthfully characterized as a western civilization losing a cyber-war to an adversarial, eastern civilization. Not one day goes by without a serious breach now and regardless of what we appear to do on the technology, people or process fronts, we continue to lose.

When you are engaged in conflict and you continually lose, it becomes increasingly difficult to keep your attitude elevated, to remain optimistic and positive and to keep engaging with passion. When the computing environments that you defend are increasingly complex and evolve with such rapidity that you can no longer keep up, the loss of confidence in your abilities and skills expands and at some point, actually create a gap that is impossible to fill.

Many folks who are involved in cybersecurity as practitioners are GenZ’ers and Millennials in that 26-42 age group, and more and more join the ranks from both demos daily.

So, if we examine the behaviors of cybersecurity practitioners from the top down, we can see a tribe of mostly male leaders who spend an inordinate amount of time in meetings, at conferences, speaking as keynote invites, attending Summits and Roundtables, presenting at global events and providing oversight for the cybersecurity industry. Many of these folks who are on the lower end of the age curve, are troubled by anxiety and depression in addition to the fear of not knowing enough about the world they are supposed to govern.

As they retire or now, quit in the wake of the Joe Sullivan verdict, their replacements will be seriously addicted and immersed in the virtual world and will pose an increasingly dangerous threat to the management of proper cybersecurity governance.

While I am not suggesting that we at CyberEd.io will not keep trying to develop coursework that addresses ALL threats in the cybersecurity world, it has become clear that we will need to focus greater attention to coursework that will address mental and emotional health as well, and other coursework that tries to help Corporate Directors understand the limits of human behavior in highly stressed, no-win environments.

I am also not suggesting that ALL cybersecurity professionals are pretenders. There are many among us who have managed to continue upskilling amidst this incredible technology growth and actually do have a handle on what’s going on around them. But, I am suggesting that those folks “may” be dwindling in numbers as the pace of change continues and the pressures of the office increase.

Either way, continuing as we are is a recipe for disaster, both as a profession and as a society. We know what must change. We simply have to do it.