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Earning an IT certification is always worth the effort. They add luster to a resume and improve job prospects with employers who pay a premium to those with the right credentials.

Foote Partners tracks IT pay and the premiums paid for 1101 tech skills. In its recently issued report, the firm found that when premiums are paid, they average 9.6% of base pay.

Many of those premiums go to those with certifications. But there are skills so in demand that employers are offering hefty pay premiums regardless of certifications. For a handful of these, the pay premium is at least 16% and their market value, Foote reports, rose no less than 5.6% during the first half of the year.

Writing for InsiderPro, David Foote presents 15 of the hottest skills requiring no certification, ranking them in order of first, cash premium earned and second, amount of market value increase. As Foote observes, his list is heavy with security, coding, database, analytics and artificial intelligence related skills.

At the top of his list is DevSecOps, which integrates security in DevOps creating, what Foote describes as a “’Security as Code’ culture with ongoing, flexible collaboration between release engineers and security teams.”

“In DevSecOps, two seemingly opposing goals – ‘speed of delivery’ and ‘secure code’ — are merged into one streamlined process, and this make it valuable to employers,” Foote explains.

We don’t have the average pay premiums for any of the skills he lists, but putting DevSecOps at the top of the list tells us the pay bump must be substantial, since the market value increase is a modest 5.6%.

The second hot skill on his list is “Security architecture and models.” “Security architecture,” Foote says, “Is a view of the overall system architecture from a security point and how the system is put together to satisfy the security requirements… we expect security models and architecting skills to continue to be strong going forward.”

Third is RStudio, a skill growing so much in demand that premiums increased 21.4% in six months. “RStudio is an integrated development environment for R, a programming language for statistical computing and graphics, and for Python,” Foote notes. Its popularity is increasing rapidly, because of R itself, which is open source, free and versatile.

The remaining skills on his list are ties:

• 4th place: Cryptography; herbal language processing; neural networks and grasp knowledge control – 6.3% market value increase.
• 8th place: Cloud Foundry & Cloudera Impala – 14.3% market value increase.
• 10th place: Apache Cassandra; synthetic intelligence (AI); cyber risk intelligence; information analytics; Google TensorFlow and predictive analytics and modeling – 6.7% market value increase.

Photo by Michael Dziedzic on Unsplash

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Here’s news guaranteed to keep a CTO up at night: Chinese hackers successfully launched new exploits against some of the most widely used programs in the world.

And it took them 5 minutes or less to do it.

Fortunately, the successful hackers were part of the 15 teams competing in this year’s Tianfu Cup — China’s largest and most prestigious hacking competition. Using new, never before seen exploits, they were able to successfully hack the web browsers Chrome, Firefox and Safari.

They were also successful against Windows 10, Ubuntu, iOS 14 running on an iPhone 11 Pro, Docker (Community Edition), VMWare EXSi (hypervisor), QEMU (emulator & virtualizer), TP-Link and ASUS router firmware. And Adobe Reader.

Each team got three, 5 minute tries to successfully hack their target with an original exploit.

“Many mature and hard targets have been pwned (compromised) on this year’s contest,” organizers said last week, announcing the results of the competition. The winning team from Chinese tech giant Qihoo 360 earned $744,500, with the balance of the $1.21 million prize spread among 7 other teams.

The software providers were informed of the exploits. ZDNet says patches for all the bugs will be provided in the coming days and weeks, “as it usually happens after every TianfuCup and Pwn2Own (the west’s version).”

Pointing out that teams were able to hack so many widely used programs and applications, Tech Times commented, “The Chinese hacking competition shows powerful and new hacking systems that are never before seen by the technology security industry. The talented computer youngsters showcased how easily and rapidly they hacked into the world’s popular operating systems.”

Photo by Setyaki Irham on Unsplash

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