10 Massive Security Breaches

The 2012 InformationWeek Salary Survey shows that security is one of the hottest sectors of the IT job market. But discussions with IT security pros suggest that they are, for the most part, considered a necessary evil by the rest of their organizations.

Even with the harsh glare of high-profile data breaches--recently intensified by the Anonymous hacktivist collective--IT security professionals often find themselves having to defend their group's mandate of defending the organization. Their efforts are often construed as a disruption to business operations, rather than a strategic element. "I feel like Don Quixote sometimes," said a senior information security analyst with a community college district. "There's lots of cooperation and collaboration with IT, but [some in the organization] think I'm a pain."

He said the vulnerability assessment and penetration testing he does to check for security holes are seen as disruptive to operations, and he's often restricted to running these tests on holidays. "I get flak for pointing out they have a problem," he said.

In one case, for example, he was chastised when an unpatched and misconfigured device knocked several switches offline during a vulnerability assessment. "The reality was that the switch was not patched, and it was vulnerable because it was misconfigured," he said.

Even with the issues IT security pros sometimes endure in-house, this year's numbers again show they are in a good spot when it comes to salary and overall compensation. IT security specialists command higher salaries than general IT security professionals, and they feel better overall about their job security than others, according to the InformationWeek survey.

Even so, only half of the security pros who responded to the survey said security has "crucial" status across all levels of management, with 31% saying it's crucial in some business areas of the organization.

The median base salary for IT security pros rose in 2012. The median base salary for security staffers was $97,000 this year, up from $90,000 in 2011; the median base salary for managers was $115,000 in 2012, up from $110,000 the year before. That's higher than the overall IT median salary of $85,000 for staffers and $108,000 for managers, according to this year's report.

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