Beyond Builders, Defenders, and Breakers

There are lots of different types of Security Practitioners out there. At a high level they can all be thought of as Builders, Defenders or Breakers.

Another taxonomy commonly used categorizes them into more role-focused categories:

• Operations Security (OPSEC)
• Communications security (COMSEC)
• Counter-intelligence
• Information security (INFOSEC)
• Signal Security (SIGSEC)
• Transmission security (TRANSEC)

Unfortunately neither of these taxonomies does an effective job at expressing areas of focus nor skill-set.

That is not to say these taxonomies are not valuable but the leave me wanting. It also seems if I tell someone I work in “computer security” they either immediately ask me if I can hack someone’s Facebook account or they ask me about what antivirus they should run; this of course isn’t how I think about security either.

So how do I think about security practitioners? I try to categorize them based on their areas of specialty and professional focus and for me this looks something like this the bellow mind-map.