How upskilling and training providers are helping close the cybersecurity skills gap

The cybersecurity skills gap is one of the most pressing challenges facing security teams as we enter 2023. Of Research Exposing a shortage of 3.4 million cybersecurity professionals, more and more organizations are turning to cybersecurity training and upskilling to improve their security posture.

This move is driving valuable investor interest in providers of online cybersecurity upskilling and talent assessment Hack the boxwhich today announced it is raising $55 million as part of a Series B funding round led by Carlyle.

Online cybersecurity training provides organizations with intermediate to upskilled junior employees, so they don’t have to compete with more experienced professionals in high demand from other organizations.

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Hack the Box’s platform provides 1.7 million users at 1,400 organizations worldwide with educational content and more than 450 virtual hack labs, which users can use to educate themselves in offensive security and penetration testing.

Upskilling out of the skills gap

The announcement comes as more organizations see the value of developing security talent internally rather than hiring externally. In fact, 62% of organizations report that training improved their organization’s cybersecurity effectiveness, reducing attempted breaches and overall security incidents.

When it comes to the format of security training, guidance on offensive security, ethical hacking and penetration testing is particularly valuable as it gives practitioners the expertise they need to proactively identify and mitigate vulnerabilities before an attacker has a chance to exploit them .

“In this rapidly changing, ever-evolving threat landscape, security teams need to focus on the skills that matter and adopt a more adversarial approach,” said Haris Pylarinos, founder and CEO of Hack the Box.

“This means hiring a team of ethical hackers to defend against cybercriminals by first tracking down and finding an organization’s vulnerabilities. The reality is that the only way to defeat an attacker is to think and act like an attacker. That’s why ethical hacking is so crucial to closing the skills gap and ending cybercriminal activity,” says Pylarinos.

Pylarinos also notes that, more broadly, ethical hacking gives organizations access to an untapped pool of highly skilled cyber talent that can help close the skills gap and secure increasingly complex environments.

Cybersecurity training competitors

One of Hack the Box’s main competitors in the market Immersive labsraising $66 million financing in October 2022, providing security teams with a platform for continuous testing and measurement of cyber resilience, with content and exercises for defensive and offensive upskilling training tailored for executive, cybersecurity, and risk and compliance teams.

Another major competitor is Offensive security, which offers a range of online resources including courses on penetration testing, cloud security, security operations, exploit development, and software security. Offensive Security also offers a penetration testing service to help enterprises test their operational resilience.

However, according to Pylarinos, the main differentiator between Hack the Box and these competitors is the emphasis on providing users with practical exercises to tackle real hacking problems.

“Perseverance and out-of-the-box thinking are the key hacking skills that make true experts, not memorizing manuals and blindly following instructions. Our platform builds a hacker mindset that helps players gain the muscle memory needed in an attack,” said Pylarinos.