Category Archives: Top Women In Cybersecurity 2017

  If you’ve been to any type of tech conference, you may have heard someone use the phrase “people, process and technology.” We’ve been told time and time again that if people solely rely on technology to protect their digital assets, the status quo of mega-breaches and wide-scale attacks will only continue. Yet while the security community rushes to give the world the latest and greatest tech tool to upend the onslaught of attacks, the status quo continues unabated on the people side: Cybersecurity is still overwhelmingly dominated by men. According to the 2017 Global Information Security Workforce Study, women make up just 11 percent of the global cybersecurity workforce and earn less than their male counterparts at every level of the industry. In honor of Women’s History Month, we present our inaugural Top Women in Cybersecurity list, filled with individuals who are upending the status quo. This list contains […]

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 Donna Dodson, Associate Director and Chief Cybersecurity Adviser, NIST Donna Dodson has multiple roles at the National Institute of Standards and Technology — the U.S. government’s premier measurement and testing laboratory. In addition to being the chief cybersecurity adviser to Acting NIST Director Kent Rochford, she is associate director of the Information Technology Laboratory — one of six labs at NIST — and director of the National Cybersecurity Center of Excellence. The center was established in 2012 by NIST along with the state of Maryland and Montgomery County. NIST provides the technical leadership and direction, Dodson said, the nonprofit federal contractor MITRE Corp. provides the personnel and 26 partner companies have signed up to provide technology and expertise. “We take cybersecurity best practices and solutions out of the laboratory, we engineer them, apply them in practice and bring them to businesses out in the community,” she explained. What is the greatest challenge […]

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 Donna Dodson, Associate Director and Chief Cybersecurity Adviser, NIST Donna Dodson has multiple roles at the National Institute of Standards and Technology — the U.S. government’s premier measurement and testing laboratory. In addition to being the chief cybersecurity adviser to Acting NIST Director Kent Rochford, she is associate director of the Information Technology Laboratory — one of six labs at NIST — and director of the National Cybersecurity Center of Excellence. The center was established in 2012 by NIST along with the state of Maryland and Montgomery County. NIST provides the technical leadership and direction, Dodson said, the nonprofit federal contractor MITRE Corp. provides the personnel and 26 partner companies have signed up to provide technology and expertise. “We take cybersecurity best practices and solutions out of the laboratory, we engineer them, apply them in practice and bring them to businesses out in the community,” she explained. What is the greatest challenge […]

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Masha Sedova, Co-founder, Elevate Security The human factor is maybe the biggest unsolved problem in cybersecurity. How do you fix people so they can do security more effectively? How do you fix security so it fits people better? Masha Sedova ran the team whose job it was to change security behavior at Salesforce from 2012 until Dec. 2016. At the end of the year, she co-founded Elevate Security, where she tests user behavior and puts them on campaigns to practice new security behavior.  Can you talk about where we are today versus where we were then on human behavior and awareness and cybersecurity? It seems like a different environment but what have you seen actually working on this? It’s been slower than I’d like it to be. Security professionals have been trying to solve the people problem for decades. We’re not very good at it. We’re really good at security, we’re not […]

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Mischel Kwon, President, MKA Cyber Over a three-decade career in security, Mischel Kwon held a succession of increasingly highly-ranked technical leadership positions in both the public and private sector before hanging her own shingle in 2010 and founding MKACyber, a security consulting firm that assesses and builds security operations centers and runs a managed SOC service. Prior to being made director of the U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team in 2008, she was the deputy CISO for the Department of Justice, in which job she built and deployed the Justice Security Operations Center to monitor and defend the department’s network against cyber threats. Kwon also worked as the vice president for public sector security solutions at RSA and ran the George Washington University Cyber Defense Lab. MKACyber, a privately held 40-strong company, is “growing very rapidly,” Kwon says, “with both federal and commercial customers all over the country.” Last year, she also founded the […]

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Kimber Dowsett, Security Architect, 18F During a class graduation for Apple’s recently launched “Genius” training program in 2005, former Apple CEO Steve Jobs approached one of the few female graduates with a smile and handshake. Jobs expressed his delight at seeing a female in the typically male-heavy class. Today, 12 years later, and while Silicon Valley continues to struggle with diversity issues, that same graduate is one of the cybersecurity community’s best known engineers. Kimber Dowsett is a security architect for 18F, a specialized technology division within the General Services Administration, or GSA, that’s been called the U.S. government’s startup. 18F is a unique organization in that its employees often work directly with a myriad of different government agencies; meaning that they come in contact with numerous computer networks. Dowsett has worked over the past year to defend 18F from hackers and to make sure that if the organization were […]

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Niloofar Howe, Chief Strategy Officer, RSA Niloofar Howe has a lot to balance as the cybersecurity landscape shifts. As Chief Strategy Officer for RSA, she’s responsible for the health and direction of the business, as well as figuring out a way large incumbent companies like RSA can work with a broad set of companies to deliver on the changing needs of her customers. Howe has learned how to hone in on strategies by working alongside former government leaders, including former NSA Director Lt. General Ken Minihan during her time at Paladin Capital Group. Now, she’s busy ensuring RSA is well positioned to deliver globally . Can you talk about the biggest challenge you’ve faced in your career? How did you conquer that challenge? There isn’t one good answer to this question because professional challenges change as you progress in your career. As I progressed and earned a seat at the […]

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Amanda Rousseau, Malware Researcher, Endgame Amanda Rousseau’s job puts her knee deep in the guts of malware. A research engineer at Endgame, Rousseau’s history includes two years at the Department of Defense Cyber Crime Center as a malware reverse engineer and computer forensic examiner. Malware is weird and ever changing, so we talked to Rosseau about exactly what she’s seen and where she’s looking next. What’s the most interesting or powerful malware you’ve seen? I actually have a couple of my favorites. They’re all APT malware. Everyone knows Stuxnet and Flame from the same creators, some of the most advanced malware out there. I particularly like the more multi-platform type of malware, kind of like the Careto mask. It was a multi-stage attack, it had payloads for both Windows and OS X and it could be run on Linux as well. I thought that was quite interesting. These guys thought about going after whatever environments a […]

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Amelie Koran, ‎U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Office of the Inspector General Societal biases are not always apparent to those who aren’t exposed to them on a daily basis. Amelie Koran has had experience dealing with these biases from multiple angles. As one of the first transgendered advocates inside the White House, she’s been working past those biases as much as she’s been working to set out the IT strategy for various segments of the federal government. Now at HHS, she works to modernize the agency’s infrastructure, implement best practices, and push the security community to navigate through their own biases.  Can you talk about the biggest challenge you’ve faced in your career? How did you conquer that challenge? For me, I’m transgendered. So I managed to go so far in my career, and transitioned, and was told by a number of people that doing so would be a career ender. […]

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Suzanne Vautrinot, President, Kilovolt Consulting; Wells Fargo board member, Major General and Commander, United States Air Force (retired) Suzanne Vautrinot retired from the U.S. Air Force in Oct. 2013 as a major-general and commander of the 24th Air Force, where she’d been in charge of the USAF’s cyber war-fighting capability. During the three decades since her graduation from the Air Force Academy, Vautrinot served as special assistant to the vice chief of staff of the USAF and had senior cyber jobs, including director of plans and policy at U.S. Cyber Command. After retirement, she dived headfirst into the private sector and joined the board of directors of several companies, leveraging her leadership skills and cyber expertise for the Wells Fargo bank, computer security firm Symantec, engineering and project management giant Parsons, water and energy services provider Ecolab and cutting-edge technology research outfit Battelle. Each of the five companies “represents a completely different […]

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