Whether you’re a plumber or a landscaper, or in another industry that one does not normally associate with cybersecurity, the time could come that your business requires a basic level of cyber training to maintain its status quo.
For some, that moment may have already arrived.
With that in mind, local cybersecurity information-sharing nonprofit CyberHawaii has established a cyber training program for businesses and nonprofits to familiarize themselves with the basics under a new initiative called Cyber Ready Hawaii.
Funded through a $250,000 grant from the Department of Business, Economic Development and Tourism, or DBEDT, Cyber Ready Hawaii has been rolled out in a pilot program with three small- and medium-sized businesses.
“Over time the last few years, we’ve been starting to really look at the Hawaii economy more broadly,” Jodi Ito, chair of CyberHawaii and the chief information security officer at the University of Hawaii, recently told Pacific Business News. “There is a need for cybersecurity professionals because of how security is embedded into almost everything we do, every day.”
Businesses can apply for the free, four-to-six-week Cyber Readiness Program on CyberHawaii’s website.
Right now, Ito says that there is a lack of basic awareness about cyber threats in the state, even with the rise in cyber attacks during the coronavirus pandemic. The program will teach general cybersecurity awareness about the threats, and about basic cyber hygiene practices.
The goal is to train 250 businesses by the summer of 2022. To do that, CyberHawaii is looking to train about 15 “cyber leader” advisors. Right now, it has three, so it is looking for applicants there, too.
The U.S. Department of Defense is in the process of rolling out a new standard of cybersecurity, known as Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification. While Department of Defense contractors who handle classified information will have an increased CMMC requirement, even those who don’t deal with such matters, but are working with the DoD in a tangential way or for a go-between must have a baseline level of certification.
The standard is to be rolled out across a five-year period through Fiscal Year 2025.
“We feel a lot of the small and medium businesses are not going to be prepared to be certified even at the base level, which is CMMC Level 1,” Ito said. “[That] will be a requirement to be awarded any contract as either a primary contractor or a subcontractor. So this is why the whole initiative around the Cyber Ready Hawaii came up.”
The Cyber Ready Hawaii cyber leaders will conduct virtual meetings with a designated team leader from a participant company. Companies’ participants will dedicate three to five hours a week.
Per Cyber Hawaii, those who complete its program will be ready to meet basic cybersecurity safeguarding and will have prepared and practiced going through an incident response plan. That, in turn, will better position them for tough-to-get and sometimes cost-prohibitive certifications like CMMC.
"The response from the business community has been very positive," Jill Tokuda, co-director of CyberHawaii, emailed PBN. "With significant increases in cyber intrusions and attacks, businesses and nonprofits are looking for ways to protect their systems and prepare their employees. Your best cybersecurity defense are your people. Our program is unique in that it combines basic safeguarding principles with hands on training to make sure that both your employees and your policies are cyber ready and secure."
CyberHawaii is looking to train 250 small- and medium-sized businesses by summer 2022, not summer 2021.
