Cybersecurity Career Ambassadors - A NIST NICE Community of Interest - Karl Sickendick

yeah all right look at that already done thanks for the Applause uh catch you later at the gift shop uh my name car my name is Carl s dick welcome if you're not here to hear about cyber security careers and and Shar sharing the word and telling other people about how great cyber security careers can be uh that you're in the wrong place uh the bathroom is down the hall the beer is right out in the hall but thanks for coming so my name is Carl sick andick um I am let's see what did I write up there my uh I'm active duty Air Force officer lieutenant colonel in the Air Force so I've got a

call sign Rosie um I'm also a dad uh to two kids who showed up today thanks thanks so much and and the husband of that one in the back thank you um I'm stationed here at joint Bay San Antonio I've got a a bachelor's in electrical engineering and a masters in computer science and I'm the current commander of the 90th seber operations Squadron the home of the home of the hacker hack them up that's the stickers and I'm repping our gear here today but let me get this out of the way at the start this is a this is a volunteer effort that I'm a part of totally separate from my job um it's just a

labor of love and my opinions this this is my opinion it represents my opinion not the opinion of the dod or the Air Force or or anybody like that just just me personally um safe to say I'm a huge nerd uh I've been doing programming and and developing tools in the like for years um and and I love attending security conferences because I get to talk with with folks that are kind of likeminded I get to I get to hear from folks but why why have you showed up at a security conference today anybody willing to share ma'am in the back why have you showed up here today uh some really attractive I am invited I got 20 bucks for you

later uh what who else why you're here why are you here to learn and contribute to learn and contribute excellent yeah me too anybody else yeah D volunteer and spread the word volunteer and spread the word anybody else anybody that networking networking opportunities y networking with kind of like-minded folks folks in in the same kind of Realm domain anybody else kind of first timer at beat sides or conference in general why' you show up today cpes what's that cpes c for what uh ccsp and awesome do you find a a learning benefit on top of the just like you know getting some points yeah there's been a lot of good talks today excellent good I hope you're

having fun um so I you know I think I think folks come to these for for all those reasons to learn about the domain that we love and find interesting and and like to geek out on and and and probably a lot of us have cyber security uh hacking as a hobby as as much as as a job uh but also to meet others who love to learn and uh to to teach and mentor to try and to try and help grow that Community well the the cyber security career ambassador program uh that that we're here to talk about has kind of all of those motivations as part of its Mission uh so you're you're likely motivated by

meeting people and discussing cyber security that's that's why you bothered to show up on a Saturday afternoon it's hot out you know I don't know if you're as sweaty as I am uh but it's hot out it takes effort to get here it's a pretty cheap conference but it still costs a little bit to get in and then you got to sit and listen to boring people like me drone on uh but we're we all motivated to do that for for these exact reasons sharing knowledge with diverse audiences collaborating on cyber security mentoring and guiding the next generation of of hacker persons hacker man okay so that's that cyber security career ambassador program this is this

is a a a program that was started by the National Institute of Standards and Technology nist as part of their their nice framework which used to stand for national cyber education but but they took away the whole acronym and they just made it a capitalized word as what nice means if you're familiar with nice it's probably from the the framework that they've put out to consider hiring uh in the dod it's turn into the defense cyber work R framework uh but it's it's it describes it attempts to describe the knowledge and the skills required for all all kinds of jobs across the cyber security Spectrum but this this started up uh as a as a White House initiative and as a

and as a initiative by law to really spread cyber security education and increase the amount of uh capacity and knowledge that we've got here in the US so the stated purpose of this career Ambassador community of Interest mentor and guide others to cultivate the next generation of cyber experts who are diverse inclusive and dedicated to protecting the cyber but in in plain English the goal is to tell people about cyber careers it's just that simple tell people about cyber careers how to get into them what the benefits are why they should do it it kicked off at the beginning of 2024 but it was kind of being organized back in 23 so new program already got about 150

folks and when we host our our monthly meetings we get about 50 attendees you know and and so to me that's a pretty live community of interest uh people are shown up they're active they're sharing what they're doing along these lines uh so this this is an expert that an excert that I I clip from White house.gov uh talking about this program and how it's it's uh uh helping accomplish some national level objectives in the URL down there what what do these ambassadors do cyber security career ambassador program host events that bring people together over cyber security uh speak at events like bides try try and inform others in general we try and go for audiences that

are not already in this career space audiences that are are maybe considering careers uh last year I got to go to talk at the Texas cyber Summit last speaker mentioned that as well he said he had a little tearful moment at the Texas cyber Summit up in Austin that's happening in May of 25 they're kind of skipping 24 but that was an excellent event and I suspect this is a little bit too where you can capture folks that are are really not in this career for you know they're coming to pick their first lock you know maybe maybe learn about some of the tools and techniques that are out there but that they're maybe not in this

cerial already that's that's who us ambassadors are trying to go after we're trying to inform those folks so that they understand the road to a cyber security career uh you know if if creating and sharing videos or other content on social media is really your jam that's we need ambassadors to help us with that too because I am not a social media guy um but uh but some people are so that's what we're looking for ambassadors to do as an example uh at at my unit the 90th SE operations Squadron we we uh we've been mentoring some cyber Patriot teams right we've been providing technical mentorship um and so earlier this year uh we we brought in the high

schoolers and we kind of showed them around our office we introduced them to people that are doing uh our the type of work that we do which is cyber capability development we got a web page if you're interested I handed out those stickers even though this this is not at all Affiliated always recruiting always recruiting uh we we showed them around our office which we call the shed and uh and told them about what what each what each of our folks do we gave them some demos and then and then I got a chance to talk to them directly and tell them for those interested the path to becom uh an Air Force contributor right so

we've got government uh civilians we've got contracted civilians and we've got military members as well um not everybody in cyber Patriot is interested in a career in cyber security a lot of those folks are familiar with the program they're they're mostly trying to find something to do maybe they want some a credit you know something that they can put on their college application maybe that uh that number of the opposite sex or the same sex that they're interested in is is participating and so they're participating too but you know as I described what we do in cyber security to defend critical infrastructure right to defend National Security people were interested you know there were there

were a few people that were on the edge of their seats I had that one guy in the back who asked all the [ __ ] questions but he was on the edge of his seat right I I recognize that guy you know silly questions but but really genuinely curious and and just just finding and talking to a few of those people encouraging them to build a home lab instead of trying to hack servers across the internet um encouraging them how to how to get into a college degree program that'll spit them out into this field uh suggesting some potential career paths uh that I find that really rewarding uh because they don't give me any time to

do programming anymore so I just have to you know live vicariously so so that's exactly what ambassadors do and and we're we're going after folks of all ages as I mentioned this we've got some slide Decks that we share amongst the ambassadors that so that people have things to build upon and these next couple of slides are from a K22 deck that we've got when when the fire truck pulls up and the fireman steps out and the kids look up at that fireman and in San Antonio it's amazing when the fire truck my daughter is in preschool and when the fire truck shows up there's like two women right there's like five dudes there's a lot of diversity on the

fire cruise in San Antonio and so those kids in the preschool they look up and they see someone they're more than likely see someone that looks like them they can Envision themselves being a fir person driving that big old truck like who remembers wanting to do that when they were a kid I do how do we do that for cyber security that's that's what we're trying to do when it comes to K12 is like help help people Envision what that means help them Envision like why why is this nerd [ __ ] fun oh no kids in here right my kids left no kids anymore I guess I'll watch my language so trying to make it visible to

them like trying to help them understand what's going on so you got you got some vineet that we can kind of share about notable folks in in cyberspace in in in the public domain that are doing this cyber security work and not only you know a diverse group of people but also a diverse group of jobs because like you know I think of I think of like hacker stuff you know writing exploits and and uh gaining persistence and things like that but cyber security also includes like constructing the infrastructure making sure that it meets the standards whatever those standards may be uh working policy issues working sales you know all of there there's a whole lot of cyber security careers and

and in the US we need them all we need them all so that we can compete on the world stage and remain relevant and so you know again A diversity of of people we want people to be able to see themselves whoever we're talking to so we've got we've got somebody you know potentially who's who's uh writing fiction and and telling the story about cyber security and the Navy veteran and then we've got we've got a woman who helped create a bunch of Honeypot software and we can kind of talk to each of those points and then you can also kind of we also try and throw in games sometimes oh the kids are back so I won't cuss anymore

um uh you can you can also you can also you know involve games you know the first time you learned about a c site if you're like me it was in like an activity book at some point when you were a kid and and there was a little code thing uh you know maybe you had a little decoder ring or something like that well that that directly that that kind of skill set that interest that curiosity that leads you to create codes that's very applicable to cryptography and and other parts of of our cyber security careers uh and then for for folks that are a little bit older they they've got a set of skills

already they've got a set of interests at least hobbies and things that they're interested in and and and those kind of people really want more of a a well-defined career path help me understand you know how how do my skills and interests pair up with those careers and so we've got some you know kind of poster kind of uh print offs that we can that we can share out so all again these are all materials that other ambassadors have created and in our community we're sharing we just got like a Google Drive and we got a mailing list um and then you can you can seal from other ambassadors to throw a presentation together but of course the most

interesting thing is when you have when you have your own stories and your own interests that you can share with the crowd uh of of students uh high school you know young students high schoolers college students college graduates you know maybe maybe at a table at a conference wherever there's all kinds of opportunities to be an ambassador so on the right you know somebody might imagine hey I've got I've got some math skills how do how do I you know where can I go in cyber security cryptography you don't really see cryptograph cryptographic professionals running around all the time that's a pretty Niche field but certainly there are people that do it and uh would be

interested in doing that when they when they grow up and then of course uh you know the kind of more common threat Hunter you might you might learn from this that if you've got a man bun and round glasses then threat Hunter is is a is a good skill set for you but but of course kind of the more common thing both both in the in the dod world in the government side DHS and then also in in the public sector right there's a lot there's a lot of people that doing thread hunting these days so how how can you participate join our mailing list really we got we got a uh a website down here

here's the tiny URL that goes there if you Google cyber security career Ambassador nist you'll find this web page super easy you'll find my dorky face on there as one of the co-chairs uh and then there's a link to the mailing list on there just just shoot it an email it's a Google groups uh mailing list and uh then you'll see uh some of the events to participate in uh after after joining the mailing list attend an info section it's on the third Tuesday of every month at 6 PM Eastern 5 Central it's uh it's hosted on Microsoft teams we'll send out the link on the mailing list it's the kind of you know how to

what do we expect of ambassadors it's it's basically exactly what I've talked about here we ask ambassadors to host at least one session a year that that extols the virtues of cyber security careers you know Target an audience and then come tell us about it afterwards so we've got a form where we can collect your your feedback you know what what kind of a group did you go speak to or or what kind of a a a social media site did you put information out on can you give us a link to your presentation can you drop your presentation in so that other ambassadors can use it

getting that info back is becoming really important because like I said this this program has White House level attention we're trying to we're trying to send back up our impacts and our results so that the national government the executive branch can understand uh can understand how we're reaching audiences uh and encouraging cyber security careers in the United States so number you know the nice program has a number of different efforts within it and this is just one of them but that's why we've got to collect that information and and I'm gonna leave about five minutes for for questions here in the end but uh some some additional resources so on this web page it's pretty easy to it's pretty easy to

Google this as well this cyber security week they've put out a number of videos over the past few years that delve into a bunch of different cyber security careers so I'm you know I'm very familiar with my path and the path that leads to a lot of careers around the Air Force I'm much less familiar with how to go work for some company like defense unicorns or some somebody like that right but and exactly what kind of some of those different kind of careers entail but but a lot of those are shared on this web page you can click on these videos you can see Laura herel talk about being a database administrator for USAA for instance it's a little bit of a

promo just a couple minutes and then a little bit of the Practical side as well so you know one great resource that's out there on this site but as part of this nice program they've Consolidated a lot of other good information as well some game sites I don't think that they yet have a link to the military cyber professionals Association uh like digital kids thing yet but they probably should um so a lot of good resources out there to Leverage is Ambassador um obviously you don't have to join this program to be an ambassador about cyber secur careers uh so even even if you're not all this kind of stuff is available just on the open web

you know a lot if you're if you're in this and you love it you're probably already basically an ambassador for cyber security and that's excellent and then and then one other thing there're nice conference uh they're bringing a k through2 educators conference here this winner so this kind of like this happens every year jump cities if you're in that K through2 Arena like as an administrator or a teacher or or whatever then you might be interested in networking with some other folks over cyber security education and and so here's the conference it's it's not super it's not super cheap and accessible like bsides U but it it should be interesting in this year it's here in San

Antonio okay so that's about uh 20 minutes what kind of questions you have any questions shoot tabs or spaces oh tabs that turn into spaces I realize that's how I should be answering that seems to be a lot of confusion hit the tab keep turning into spaces pep eight baby shoot so are the program doing anything to spread cyber into the rural communities because like in here in s Anon area there's a lot with cyber Patriot and there scholarships and all that but then I have Caitlyn here who was on my cyber Patriot team out in a rural Town she's going into cyber but she does she never got the opportunities that we did here in San Antonio and so

now looking for opportunities for her so how do I help her get into this right and how do I get more resources to my rural communities that's a great question that's a great question um we're not as organized here in San Antonio as in some other places new new program uh in Pennsylvania they've got a regional chair who has been able to kind of find some centers in those world but it's so dependent on the people that might want to go kind of share that message and and our you know our program is a is a program of volunteers so it really you know if you had somebody that was out there that just wanted to jump

in and volunteer with their local rural school school or something like that I'm sure it would happen how how far out do you live I maybe I'd be happy to come out there and talk to you your school or whatever so and then so we're focusing on all the towns like on time nice nice yeah I mean that'd be fun it's it's not that far from LA right so it's not so we've been trying to get more of the LA commun I'll give you my card again after a card after this we can uh we can may it set something up yeah it sounds fun yeah I'm sure I'm sure we could get some some folks to show up out there and talk

about cyber security it's so critical like we like I mentioned diversity it's a goal of the program to build diversity um in cyber security um and and we don't so much talk about like hey how do we reach out to rural areas it's tough It's the Last Mile problem right what else shoot so you said the White House has taken interest yeah what are you guys hoping that they're going to see um so this this year our goal is with the cyber security uh that cyber security career week we're trying to have on events in every state we're right now trying to build up Regional leads in each of the kind of DHS sisa regions uh so there's 10

and so we've got we've got a regional lead in like Pennsylvania Maryland area we've got notional Regional lead out in California but we really want to spread that out and and continue to build this network so uh you know metrics wise I would love to be able to have some metrics that say we reached this many people and this many people chose cyber security look at the bump and degrees that were granted after we did this we are we are nowhere near mature enough to have that kind of a metric but so you know more of like measures of uh performance instead of Effectiveness right now yeah what else so what would catastrophic success look

[Applause] like uh that's a that's a great question yeah you know uh you know for for this year catastrophic success looks like we have we have Regional leads in each area we've got an event in every state at that cyber security career week uh we've got we've got policym recommendations and things like that but you know really like I said our goal is to build that Ambassador Network um on our mailing list we've got some kind of like uh rudimentary uh me ambassador to Ambassador mentorship opportunities going on so um I you know I hope that it's as fulfilling for the ambassadors as for the people that they talk to what else so the the night work that you

showed had things like software developer database administrators adman things like that but it seems like when we talk about cyber we talk about like there's some cyber security folks and then there's all the it folks and developers over there and so I guess as an ambassador like how much how much of it is getting people into the security or it field and how much of it is trying to actually like bring those two communities that need to be one Community together um that's that's a great question that's a great question you know we're kind of focused more on just spreading worried about the the fields and you know I think I think related to that there's the problem of

if you're on one side you maybe don't see the other side as cyber if you're on the other side and none of us see sales as cyber right but like all all are critical pieces of it um and you know right now I'd say we're really reliant on the ambassadors to apply our own experience and so we're probably we might you know as a consequence of that we might be kind of reinforcing the existing Rift that I I agree I think exists as well but you know these resources that n is showing they cover they cover a huge gamut of careers so they got they got examples from each of the kind of major areas of their nice uh

nice thing which covers both sides of that what else anything else shoot what regions need the most help um that's a good question you know uh for anybody who works for the government you know how much trouble it is to even like set up a web page uh let alone one that tells where your volunteers are kind of located uh but I don't work for the government when I work when I do this or this so it's it's easier for me um Texas especially this area is a is a we've got a number of folks here but we don't have a typ kind of organization going on um I think uh North Central you know uh

Minnesota type area doesn't have a ton and of course I I know of maybe one Ambassador in Alaska but you know even I'm kind of a little bit impressed by that so and it's this is a worldwide organization it's an international you know we're not just limiting ambassadors to the US and and things like that but obviously it's the US government all right I'm being cut off I'm being kicked off but thank you I'm going to stick around afterwards if you'd like any information about how to join I'm gonna hand out my card and yeah thank you thanks for attending