Welcome to this week’s edition of the Threat Source newsletter.
Ask anybody in this industry what the work does to the health of the people who do it and you get one word back: burnout. It's a fine word, in and of itself. It’s easy to reach for, understandable to everyone… and it's the wrong one, most of the time.
So, story time. Last year I gave an interview with the amazing Hazel Burton about VPNFilter, and my run-in with burnout. I was a manager during that time, and it took a toll on me and on the people around me, and when it was over I didn't have language for what had happened. Neither did my peers. Neither did my leadership. Nobody was withholding help from me… we just didn't have the words.
Enter this summer, and I was afforded a unique opportunity to mentor some MBA students on burnout in cybersecurity. I know a thing or two about it, so I leapt at a chance to share and help grow future leaders. But I decided I was going to do more than share and relieve my experiences in this industry – I wanted to give back to them and the security industry. So, I fell down a fascinating and revealing research hole and learned better words to describe my experiences over my career.
I spent my summer reviewing trauma case studies, clinical and academic literature on trauma in career fields like first responders, doctors, social workers, and the military. There are many decades of research focusing on trauma in those fields. Subsequently, my brain is packed full of better words! For example, burnout is exhaustion from chronic workload, and it eases when the load eases. We know this one well. Secondary traumatic stress is what absorbing somebody else's trauma does to you, and it looks like trauma. Think the CTI analyst exposed to horrible things on the dark web. Vicarious trauma is what years of other people's worst days do to how you see the world. It changes your beliefs, not your mood. Work in cybersecurity long enough, and it can pile up on your views. Moral injury is the damage from being made to act against your own values, or stopped from doing what you knew was right. This one can affect anyone who’s ever owned an outcome, but not the decision, and that’s common in this industry.
One word, four injuries, and four different fixes. All of them are present in the industry that is cybersecurity. The problem? We’re just a young industry. Compared to medical, helping professions, or social workers, we’re incredibly immature with understanding the consequences of the work and the toll it takes on us. Next week I’ll be revealing my research and a peer-deployable framework to help others process, cope, and respond in healthy ways to keep us all in a better mental space, and staying in this good fight of protecting others.
I'm still not good at this. I'm writing it all down because I was bad at it in a way that cost me something. There's more of this in my talk at CYBR.SEC.CON next week if you're in Houston.