JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — States just north of the First Coast are still grappling with no gas at some pumps even though Colonial Pipeline is up and running again.
Eighty percent of gas stations in Washington D.C. were experiencing fuel outages Sunday, according to the website Gas Buddy. What's at the root of this? Experts say it's a need for more cybersecurity jobs.
Florida has the fourth-highest number of open cybersecurity jobs in the nation according to the website Cyberseek. Experts in the field say more of these jobs need to be filled to keep something like the gas shortage from impacting more areas of our lives.
"It's easier to be a hacker than it is to defend," said Ernie Friend, instructional program manager at Florida State College at Jacksonville. "We've got to defend against thousands of potential holes; all the hacker needs is one hole to get in."
There are more than 20,000 unfilled cybersecurity jobs in Florida and nationally nearly 500,000, according to cyberseek.org. Friend says there are not enough people going into cybersecurity to fill these jobs.
"Until recently, many didn't think it was gonna happen to them," said Friend about companies getting hit by hackers. "But I think more and more companies that are seeing the financial hit, as well as the customers, anytime a company gets hacked I think customers kind of back away from that company, at least temporarily."
One of the most common ways for companies to get hacked is through employees clicking on a link they shouldn't have clicked. Friend also sees the need for more cybersecurity workers as a chance for more people to get to work.
"People think you need to be a cyber geek to do it or you need to be super smart," he said. "None of that's true. We can take anybody. We take people all the time from high school students up into their 70's."
Colonial Pipeline reportedly paid $5 million in ransom to hackers. Ransom amounts have surged in recent years, growing by more than 80 percent according to researchers at Emsisoft Malware Lab.
Lauren Wade is the owner of Kids Can Code and is teaching the next generation of people that could stop hackers.
"It is the language of the future that kids need to know to be able to fill all these thousands of jobs that are going unfilled by American workers," Wade said.
Wade teaches kids coding, video game design, and robotics.
"I can introduce it to kids at an elementary level and literally they can translate it," she said "I have middle schoolers and high schoolers that come back to me and go, 'thank you for teaching us about all those arrows because now I'm writing Python.' Teaching these computational skills that feel like they're just playing a game really is foundational."
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