The New Generation Of Cyber Poets And Quants

It made me smile when I saw a team using poetry to hack Large Language Models, significantly removing constraints designed into systems like ChatGPT. Their article exemplifies the vast interdisciplinary nature of the field of cybersecurity. It’s not just about coders and hackers anymore. Cyberspace is touching every aspect of the human condition, from business and health to the arts and sciences. Cybersecurity needs people with specializations in a broad range of areas to bring their experiences and disciplines to the challenge, even poetry. Along with diverse professional backgrounds, to secure cyberspace we need to bring our humanity more clearly to these challenging questions. Perhaps that’s why poetry seems so poignant in 2025. 

In the public eye, cybersecurity is often viewed as limited to specialized technical skills like computer science, cryptography, information systems, and telecommunications. But the actual field has exploded beyond these origins to merge seamlessly with business-related disciplines like accounting, risk management, healthcare, leadership, and law. But it doesn’t stop there. Cybersecurity is dynamically interacting with and embedding in disciplines like psychology, sociology, neuroscience, linguistics, ethics, forensics, and the deeper philosophical questions of identity, mindset, consciousness, autonomy, and freedom.   

Partly this rapid expansion and merging with other disciplines is because our sociotechnical society is driven by digital transactions and discourse.  Social media has upended how we form our identities, work, and find a mate. This has also opened clandestine digital control on a massive scale.  This will have long-term implications for the development of human society, and the human genome.  But there is no need to wait. As Rene DiRista points out, vast social consequences have already occurred, and DNA has already been directly hacked with embedded computer viruses. 

My own professional path illustrates how the expansion of cybersecurity draws people in from various disciplines.  I was in fine arts, studying art history, drawing, photography, sculpture, and printmaking.  I studied photography with Ansel Adams and with Jerry Uelsmann, a master manipulator of photographic images decades before Photoshop.  Working with film and enlargers, I made all kinds of surreal and symbolic scenes. I also learned how to modify images photo-realistically with paint. I’ve done the opposite, working in forensic photography to make highly accurate images for courtrooms.  Then desktop publishing and computer art drew me in, and that led to a career in telecommunications, computer forensics, and data center management.  But my earlier art skills did not go fallow for long in this new land.  With the rise of social media, Instagram filters, LLM generated imagery, and deep fakes, I already had an intuitive way of understanding these things through the lens of the visual arts.  My old skills enabled me to guide organizations through this new media world, helping with sentiment analysis and social media incident response.  

This new world of cybersecurity seems expansive to the point that it’s impossible to understand it all.  Really, we can’t know every facet of any major discipline. But this vast cyber space naturally divides into many areas of specialty. We can discover where our own aptitudes and aspirations fit in a way that we can make meaningful contributions, making organizations and human society safer and more resilient. In this context, a good way to get started is to divide the cybersecurity workforce into poets and quants.   

Poets of cybersecurity include the advocates speaking in front of corporate boards; those telling the story everyone can understand when the topic is complex.  Poets also think outside the box, looking for human solutions when technical dead ends occur, or vice versa.  These poets are the Chief Information Security Officers of companies, or cybersecurity champions in departments like legal, communications, HR, operations technology, training, or strategic planning. Of course, these poets interact with IT and the technical challenges, but their shining talents are understanding what needs to be said, providing inspiration for solving problems early before they lead to catastrophe, and providing clear language when working through difficult incidents. Poetry — since before the dawn of writing — has been in some part about leadership, showing new ways of thinking, offering inspiration, imbuing mental habits, and taking the time for careful wordcraft. 

Quants design and run not just finance and technology, but also perform cyber risk analysis, digital risk forecasting, and the development and automation of new resilient ways of doing business.  Particularly, the AI tools that have emerged are accelerating this work dramatically. But they often leave quants with challenges in explainability, hallucination, bias, and unintended use.  This means that beyond 2025 quants must also become poets even more, bringing guiding narratives that help organizations understand emerging tools, their risks, their foibles, and what it takes to use and understand them well. This is about leadership. 

When students ask me about how to position themselves for a cybersecurity career, whether quant or poet, I generally need to interview them first about their background, interests, and aspirations.  Not only is the field vast, but most people don’t realize how much they are exposed to cybersecurity already.  In the corporate world, cybersecurity awareness training is usually required now, and provides a window into some of the key aspects of the field.  In addition, like my own experience in fine arts, many people bring special experience or disciplinary skills to the table that are often sought after in the cybersecurity world.  Lawyers, communications officers, technologists, and project managers can amplify skills in their current professions with cybersecurity, and this can become a bridge to more advanced roles in the field. Like any transition in our lives, if we reflect on our own capabilities and experiences, often new ways of uncovering and recharacterizing new significance in ourselves as we recraft our identities to meet our aspirations.  Again, this is certainly one process used in poetry, and fine arts in general. 

Self-reflection is not enough though, since cybersecurity is a constantly evolving field. The need to keep pace with emerging knowledge will only increase.  Quants have been transforming the way of doing business with a whole range of AI, and poets are adapting to the pace and potential of Large Language Models (LLM), disrupting and transforming work in unexpected ways.  Moving forward, quantum communications, quantum computing, and post-quantum cryptography are already having an impact on cybersecurity, as pointed out in ISACA’s Quantum Computing report on April 28, 2025.  This impact is expected to expand to quantum AI, and whole new ways of doing business.  Rapid geopolitical change, agentic AI, robotics, space systems, immersive realities, environmental change, tokenized finance, and the transformative effects of computer-mediated society are all highly intertwined with cybersecurity.  Bringing a cybersecurity mindset to our current career path or joining the field gives us an opportunity to contribute sustained value and resilience at work and for society. 

Erik Moore is a Clinical Professor at Seattle University’s Albers School of Business and Economics and the Program Director for the Online MS in Cybersecurity Leadership. His career blends institutional leadership with cybersecurity/IT operations leadership in industry, government, and academia. His research interests include creating a resilient cyber-empowered global society, defensive cyber architecture using graph theory and cyber psychology and sociology related to incident response, training and other adversarial contexts.

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