Tony Coulson, director of the Cybersecurity Center at Cal State San Bernardino, told members of Congress recently that the United States is facing a cybersecurity crisis.
Speaking before the House Subcommittee on Homeland Security, Infrastructure Protection and Innovation, Coulson said the country’s cyber workforce is short by about 500,000 workers, according to a statement on the university’s website.
“Let that number sink in,” Coulson said to the committee members. “That’s an absurd number. If this was doctors and nurses, there would be a national outcry.”
Coulson was one of four speakers invited to testify before the subcommittee. The theme was “The Cyber Talent Pipeline: Educating a Workforce to Match Today’s Threats.”
It was the first time Coulson, a professor of information decision sciences at the Jack H. Brown College of Business and Public Administration, spoke before Congress, according to the statement.