Cybermindz’s Mark Alba on Military PTSD Protocols to Treat Security Burnout

The cybersecurity industry has talked extensively about burnout, but Mark Alba, Managing Director of Cybermindz, is taking an unprecedented scientific approach to both measuring and treating it. In this special RSA episode, Mark tells David how his team applies military-grade psychological protocols originally developed for PTSD treatment to address the mental health crisis in security operations centers. Rather than relying on anecdotal evidence of team fatigue, they deploy clinical psychologists to measure resilience through validated psychological assessments and deliver interventions that can literally change how analysts' brains process stress.

Mark walks through their use of the iRest Protocol, a 20-year-old treatment methodology from Walter Reed Hospital that shifts brain activity from amygdala-based fight-or-flight responses to prefrontal cortex logical thinking. Their team of five PhDs works directly within enterprise SOCs to establish baseline psychological metrics and track improvement over time, giving security leaders unprecedented visibility into their team's actual capacity to handle high-stress incident response.

Topics discussed:

• Clinical measurement of cybersecurity burnout through validated psychological assessments including the MASLAC sleep index and psychological capital evaluations.
• Implementation of the iRest Protocol, a military-developed meditative technique used at Walter Reed Hospital for PTSD treatment.
• Real-time resilience scoring through the Cybermindz Resilience Index that combines sleep quality, psychological capital, burnout indicators, and stress response metrics.
• Research methodology to establish causation versus correlation between psychological state and SOC performance metrics like mean time to respond and incident response rates.
• Neuroscience of cybersecurity roles, including how threat intelligence analysts perform optimally at alpha brain wave levels while incident responders need beta wave states.
• Strategic staff rotation based on psychological state rather than just skillset, moving analysts between different cognitive roles to optimize both performance and mental health.

Key Takeaways: 

• Implement clinical burnout measurement using validated tools like the MASLAC sleep index and psychological capital assessments rather than relying on subjective burnout indicators in your SOC operations.
• Deploy psychometric testing within security operations centers to establish baseline resilience metrics before incidents occur, enabling proactive team management strategies.
• Establish brainwave optimization protocols by moving threat intelligence analysts to alpha wave states for creative pattern recognition and incident responders to beta wave states for rapid decision-making.
• Correlate psychological metrics with traditional SOC performance indicators like mean time to respond and incident response rates to identify causation patterns.
• Rotate staff assignments based on real-time psychological capacity assessments rather than just technical skills, optimizing both performance and mental health outcomes.
• Measure psychological capital within your security team to understand cognitive capacity for handling high-stress cyber incidents and threat analysis workloads.
• Establish post-incident psychological protocols using clinical psychology techniques to prevent long-term burnout and retention issues following major security breaches.
• Create predictive analytics models that combine resilience scoring with operational metrics to forecast SOC team performance and proactively address capacity issues.

“So we'll be looking at mean time to respond, incident response rates, typically what a SOC would use to measure their performance. Marrying that with what we call the cyberminds resilience index, that set of metrics I just described, is it causation or correlation? Once you marry those up, you can imagine all the things you can do with it. If I know the state of my staff, I can predict what's going to happen in terms of performance.” 4:08-4:33