Cybersecurity Experts 'Charge £10,000 A Day To Protect UK's Top Firms'

Britain’s top cybersecurity experts are billing major companies more than £10,000 a day to protect vulnerable IT systems from sophisticated hackers, according to recruiter Manpower.
The pay bonanza follows high-profile recent attacks on Sony, TalkTalk and JD Wetherspoon, in which personal and financial information was stolen.


Less experienced experts can still charge more than £3,000 a day to tackle the escalating threat to sensitive digital information.


Manpower’s survey found that the hourly rates charged by IT security experts were likely to continue rising next year as boardrooms scrambled to find expert advice from a limited pool of advisers.

Manpower said its own client database showed requests from employers looking for IT security expertise had quadrupled in 2015 compared with the previous year.

 Mark Cahill, the firm’s UK managing director, said: “There are millions of cyber-attacks every day with a total cost to the global economy of up to $575bn (£381bn) a year.

“Companies are having to invest heavily to protect themselves and they now believe that cyber breaches are inevitable, with their focus moving to responding to attacks rather than just prevention.

“Some individuals can command daily rates in excess of £3,000, and some top cybersecurity specialists can even earn five-figure sums daily. With the potential risk to companies so significant and no signs of demand falling, those sky-high salaries look set to continue.”

The jobs agency said the boom in pay for IT security workers came against a backdrop of strong employment trends going into the new year, driven by IT and computing and transport, storage and communications.

Manpower’s seasonally adjusted figure for the net employment outlook over the next three months jumped two percentage points to a balance of +7%, as companies ramped up hiring plans going into the new year.