Core Competencies for a Security Team

Posted: August 27th, 2021

Core Competencies for a Security Team

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Core Competencies for a Security Team

A carefully and strategically planned security team helps manage and handle data efficiently and effectively (Rajivan & Cooke, 2017). Every team member needs to understand their roles since they handle sensitive and personal data. Therefore, this essay outline core responsibilities, roles, traits, and skills critical for a well-organized security team.

As a social intelligence skill, teamwork is the ability to work with others to achieve common goals, share responsibility, participate actively, and contribute to team capabilities (Dawson & Thomson, 2018). With this ability, a security team can create and empathize with an atmosphere of cooperation, helpfulness, and respect. Furthermore, teamwork can draw all security members into active commitments and efforts. Therefore, teamwork holds essential collaboration strategies that build pride in identity, team spirit, and positive relationships.

Software development skills play a vital role in a security team. These skills help bug fixing, testing, documenting, programming, and maintaining frameworks and applications (Wang & Sbeit, 2017). Software development skills will not only impact the team with maintaining and writing source code for security implementation but also includes the conception of the desired manifestation of security approaches. The skill can be enhanced with a combination of a risk mitigation skill, which is essential for every team member. Risk mitigation helps members understand auditing and controls (Rajivan & Cooke, 2017). Hence, security teams can identify weak controls and then implement proper risk mitigation approaches. 

Understanding and knowledge to interpret and correlate data are vital for the security team. Cybersecurity personal must have knowledge, experience, and training to identify potential threats, monitor countermeasures effectiveness, and track threat vectors (Dawson & Thomson, 2018). Therefore, data analysis and science skills help monitor and detect threats using aggregation and information collection to improve data security.

Figure 1: Core competencies for a Security Team

Security tools expertise such as intrusion detection, incident management, and threat intelligence are used to block new threats and mitigate attacks. Security teams can mitigate and identify ongoing attacks and preemptively block software attacks using an intrusion detection system with these skillsets(Wang & Sbeit, 2017). Security members can filter out existing malware (like rootkits, backdoors, and Trojans) and detect social assaults, which manipulate users to reveal personal information. Thus, security tools expertise is essential to understand how to maintain, manage, and help reduce security attacks.

Further, Data Loss Prevention (DLP) is another core competency critical for any security team. DLP approach prevents and detects unwanted destruction, exfiltration, data breaches of sensitive information (Dawson & Thomson, 2018). This skill involves a combination of security policies and tools to secure and protect data leakage. Hence, DLP allows security teams to set regulations and rules, which classify sensitive and confidential information that cannot be disclosed accidentally or maliciously.

Forensic analysis is another core competency or skill for a security team. Furthermore, the forensic analysis identifies and records the consequences, reasons, and course of a security violation or incidents (Rajivan & Cooke, 2017). This expertise involves the use of a wide range of research techniques, methods, and procedures. Hence, security experts can collect different types of information by using electronic devices and by processing data.

References

Dawson, J., & Thomson, R. (2018). The future cybersecurity workforce: Going beyond technical skills for successful cyber performance. Frontiers in psychology, 9, 744.

Rajivan, P., & Cooke, N. (2017). Impact of team collaboration on cybersecurity situational awareness. In Theory and Models for Cyber Situation Awareness (pp. 203-226). Springer, Cham.

Wang, P., & Sbeit, R. (2017). A CONSTRUCTIVE TEAM PROJECT MODEL FOR ONLINE CYBERSECURITY EDUCATION. Issues in Information Systems, 18(3).