US CISOs' earnings reach $400K+ in San Francisco, survey finds

CISO salaries in the United States range from $137K to $346K, with an average yearly income of $224K, a recent survey shows.

They make even more in San Francisco, Oakland-Fremont, CA, where the average salary range is 20-30% bigger (from $170K to $430K), and New York, with a salary range of $158K-$401K.

By contrast, an average hacker earns less than $30,000 a year from malicious activities, according to HOTforSecurity.

The 10 biggest issues CISOs face are advanced persistent threats, cloud and app security, software defined networking (SDN), executive-level protection, bring your own device (BYOD), network transformation, malware/spyware, government-sponsored breaches and big data event analysis, respondents say.

According to recruiting and staffing firm Silverbull, there are 524 currently job openings in the US, and the average posting period is 47 days. The most common job titles for the CISO position include CISO, director of information security, director of information technology and director of information technology security.