Security News > 2021 > May > Kids in Hong Kong and other highly surveilled states worry infosec careers are just asking for trouble

Asian nations in which governments are keen on citizen surveillance struggle to develop ethical hackers, as prospective workers fear their activities may be misunderstood, according to security specialist Mika Devonshire.

Devonshire spent much of 2019 and 2020 in Hong Kong, working as a digital forensics and incident response specialist at Blackpanda and serving as assistant faculty at Hong Kong University.

"The climate on the University of Hong Kong campus in the fall of 2019 was a bit different that you are used to on a university campus," she said at the Black Hat Asia 2021 security conference yesterday.

Devonshire said students she met feared ISP monitoring and felt that participating in capture-the-flag events or hackathons could make them look deviant.

In a list Devonshire provided of the world's ten most surveilled countries, Asia took four positions.

Devonshire said Asia is short 2.4 million cybersecurity trainees, a huge slice of the world's four million vacancies.

News URL

https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2021/05/07/asia_ethical_hacking/