Cyber a 2-Decade Industry Evolution

Cybersecurity has obviously evolved since the early 2000s, blossoming from its roots as a niche field focused on basic system security into a complex ecosystem requiring multiple layers of protection, an army of skilled professionals, and the growth of a culture of security awareness across all facets of organizations, governments, and consumer life.

In this video filmed at the RSAC Conference last week, Dark Reading Editor-in-Chief Kelly Jackson Higgins celebrates Dark Reading’s 19th birthday, and offers key insights into the transformation and current state of cybersecurity, with historical perspective drawn from nearly two decades of Dark Reading coverage.

She also discusses priority areas for 2025 and beyond, including application development, identity management, workforce development, tool management and optimization, and building organization-wide security awareness.

And, Jackson Higgins offers a look into Informa Tech Target's newly formed Cybersecurity Group, which now contains three complementary brands:
Dark Reading;
Search Security , which focuses on deep technical content, comprehensive research and buying information; and Cybersecurity Dive , which has a newsletter-forward, executive-level focus.

Eye on Tech:
Kelly, we are so excited to have you because you shared with us just before we started recording that today is actually the 19th birthday of Dark Reading. Tell us about the evolution of the security industry that you've seen over the years.

[Ethical hackers] don't have to get attention for finding vulnerabilities anymore. Part of the game now is to be able to find the weaknesses before the bad guys do. So, it's become a much more professional industry in a lot of ways, but I will say some of the same problems are still here, and sometimes I can't believe I'm still writing about some of the same issues now that we were then.

Security is hard.

Eye on Tech: I can imagine, if you look back at over 19 years, it could almost be a time machine of the trending topics in cybersecurity. So maybe it evolved to cloud and mobile, and then it was Dev Sec Ops , and now it's AI.

It was also just more of the desktop stuff back then. There was a little bit of cloud, but it wasn't taking over like it is now. Security was very much focused on-premises, on your servers and your desktops. There weren't any mobile devices rolling around at that point; I think I might have had a Black Berry for email. Machine security and software security are still important, but things to secure are just in more places now, and places that you don't necessarily realize are there.

Now you have to really understand the cloud, and AI, which is actually not a new thing. It's been around for a long time, but it's now taking off.

The other thing that we talk a lot about in our coverage is identity security, because that's a really big one, especially with the cloud. There are machine identities. There are people identities. And people come and go. Some companies aren't always great at tracking the privileges they have for systems, or even if someone's left the company. Those kinds of things sometimes get left floating out there, leaving companies vulnerable.

And as you know, passwords are still a complete nightmare, even though they were supposed to be gone by now. We do have some more options with passcodes, but it's still not completely a simple process. And almost every breach involves stolen credentials.

In general, today there are just more layers of security to think about. It was more network security back at the beginning because everybody was on-premises. So, now it's a little bit higher up the stack.

Eye on Tech:
Could you expand on the reach that Dark Reading and the Informa Tech Target group has now within cybersecurity?

KJH:
So when Informa merged with Tech Target, we created a new group, the cybersecurity media team, with three brands:
Dark Reading, which is the largest one;
Search Security; and Cybersecurity Dive. We've been working together the last few months on how we can collaborate in terms of coverage. We have…