EA - 80,000 Hours career review: Information security in high-impact areas by 80000 Hours

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: 80,000 Hours career review: Information security in high-impact areas, published by 80000 Hours on January 16, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.This is a cross-post of a career review from the 80,000 Hours website written by Jarrah Bloomfield. See the original here.IntroductionAs the 2016 US presidential campaign was entering a fractious round of primaries, Hillary Clinton’s campaign chair, John Podesta, opened a disturbing email.[1] The March 19 message warned that his Gmail password had been compromised and that he urgently needed to change it.The email was a lie. It wasn’t trying to help him protect his account — it was a phishing attack trying to gain illicit access.Podesta was suspicious, but the campaign’s IT team erroneously wrote the email was “legitimate” and told him to change his password. The IT team provided a safe link for Podesta to use, but it seems he or one of his staffers instead clicked the link in the forged email. That link was used by Russian intelligence hackers known as “Fancy Bear,” and they used their access to leak private campaign emails for public consumption in the final weeks of the 2016 race, embarrassing the Clinton team.While there are plausibly many critical factors in any close election, it’s possible that the controversy around the leaked emails played a non-trivial role in Clinton’s subsequent loss to Donald Trump. This would mean the failure of the campaign’s security team to prevent the hack — which might have come down to a mere typo[2] — was extraordinarily consequential.These events vividly illustrate how careers in infosecurity at key organisations have the potential for outsized impact. Ideally, security professionals can develop robust practices that reduce the likelihood that a single slip-up will result in a significant breach. But this key component for the continued and unimpaired functioning of important organisations is often neglected.And the need for such protection stretches far beyond hackers trying to cause chaos in an election season. Information security is vital to safeguard all kinds of critical organisations such as those storing extremely sensitive data about biological threats, nuclear weapons, or advanced artificial intelligence, that might be targeted by criminal hackers or aggressive nation states. Such attacks, if successful, could contribute to dangerous competitive dynamics (such as arms races) or directly lead to catastrophe.Some infosecurity roles involve managing and coordinating organisational policy, working on technical aspects of security, or a combination of both. We believe many such roles have thus far been underrated among those interested in effective altruism and reducing global catastrophic risks, and we’d be excited to see more altruistically motivated candidates move into this field.In a nutshellOrganisations with influence, financial power, and advanced technology are targeted by actors seeking to steal or abuse these assets. A career in information security is a promising avenue to support high-impact organisations by protecting against these attacks, which have the potential to disrupt an organisation’s mission or even increase existential risk.Jeffrey Ladish contributed to this career review. We also thank Wim van der Schoot for his helpful comments.Why might information security be a high-impact career?Information security protects against events that hamper an organisation’s ability to fulfil its mission, such as attackers gaining access to confidential information. Information security specialists play a vital role in supporting the mission of organisations, similar to roles in operations.So if you want an impactful career, expertise in information security could enable you to make a significant positive difference in the world by helping important organis...