CISO salaries are on the rise. Photo by Bruce Bennett/Getty Images
Cybercrime pays. $421,000 per year to be exact — for some chief information security officers (CISOs) in San Francisco, according to SilverBull, a full-service IT and cybersecurity recruiting and staffing company based in Manchester, Conn.
A new cybersecurity salary bulletin from SilverBull reports that the median average salary for CISOs in the U.S. is $223,000 — up from $204,000 in a bulletin they posted just two months ago.
The 6 highest paying locations for CISO jobs in the U.S., along with the top of the salary range for each are:
The top CISO salaries appear to be in line with the cost of living in those cities. According to Business Insider, the estimated costs of annual necessities for a family living in each are: Washington, D.C. — $106,000; New York — $99,000; San Francisco — $92,000; Los Angeles — $74,000; Chicago — $72,000; and Atlanta — $64,000.
Silverbull states that the biggest issue facing CISOs are advanced persistent threats (APTs) — which is a network attack in which an unauthorized person gains access to a network and stays there undetected for a long period of time.
Juniper Research recently predicted that the rapid digitization of consumers’ lives and enterprise records will increase the cost of data breaches to $2.1 trillion globally by 2019, increasing to almost four times the estimated cost of breaches in 2015.
The cybercrime wave — along with a severe shortage of cybersecurity workers — may push CISO salaries closer to the half-million-dollar-per-year mark in the next year or two.
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