Black Hat USA celebrated its 25th anniversary in Las Vegas this week. During the opening keynote, former Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) director Chris Krebs said he expects the cybersecurity landscape will get worse before getting better, while the future trajectory depends on technology, threat actors, government, and the people.

For the security landscape, Krebs’ takeaway from the recent discussions he had with experts is “bearish in the short term, bullish in the long term, things are gonna get worse before they get better.”

He said he is "bearish in the short term" due to four main reasons: technology, threat actors, government, and people.

Technological innovations will collect and generate more data, along with the cloud migration, which makes cyberspace become an “unthinkable complexity.” At the same time, ransomware has gone professionalized and the number of threat actors is exploding.

“There are going to be splashy, new, and novel [security] events in the near future,” Krebs warned. 

When it comes to nation states, “every country on the face of this earth is looking at the digital ecosystem as a new domain — the fifth domain,” he said. “They're developing capabilities for espionage, for domestic surveillance,… and disruption.”

Meanwhile, governments still have to figure out how to engage, regulate, and manage their own systems. 

On the flip side, Krebs is bullish on the future because of the maturing security industry and a smarter, increasingly tech-native workforce.

Still though, organizations have to define their principles and establish their values, such as “who you are as a company, what you're out there to accomplish, how you're going to do it, what your red lines are,” he said. 

“We have to also understand that if you are core to the fabric of the Internet right now, which is really the core to the fabric of the economy, you're part of the national security community,” he added. “You have to take security seriously.”

Business leaders should also make long-term plans for the next few years, Krebs suggested. “Right now, every single company out there should be conducting simulation scenarios, impact assessments, tabletop exercises at the executive level around what's happening in the Strait of Taiwan.”

Additionally, as the first director of the Department of Homeland Security's CISA, Krebs pointed out the U.S. government hasn’t kept up with the changes in the digital environment, and needs to rethink its interactions with technology, and its overarching strategy.

“It could be something as simple as pulling CISA out of the Department of Homeland Security as a sub-cabinet agency [so that] it's allowed to operate as an operational agency on its own,” he said. 

During the keynote, Krebs also offered personal and professional advice to the audience. He argued that there are five factors to living a meaningful life online and offline — define your principles, find your support networks, have jobs and bosses that respect you and treat you as you deserve to be treated, find something meaningful outside of your work, and don’t read the comments or listen to random people online. 

“Life’s too short to work for assholes, so don’t,” he said. “Life’s too short to eat bad food. What I really mean is find something you enjoy, that gives you meaning value outside of your day job.”