Career Notes

Cyber analyst, Tracy Maleeff, shares her unexpected journey from the library to cybersecurity and offers advice for those both seeking to make a change and those doing the hiring. It's not just about the invitation, it's more than that. Our thanks to Tracy for sharing her story with us.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Bernard Brantley, CISO from Corelight sits down to share his inspiring career path with others. Bernard started at the very bottom of the tech stack, and shares how he was extremely unclear about what it was that he wanted to do in life and how he was going to get there. Ultimately he reached a point now where he has the self confidence and an incredible level of success that allows him to be auth...

This week, we invite our very own Chris Hare, N2K's Project Management Specialist Content Developer, to join and discuss her career. Growing up, Chris shares that she wanted to be a veterinarian, which slowly turned into her becoming a writer for the first part of her career. She shares that she started off writing marketing copy for the technology and E-commerce space, writing for everyone from N...

Ian Blumenfeld, a Research Director from Two Six Technologies sits down to share his story with us. Ian begins his story by sharing he wanted to be a scientist, slowly he began to figure out and pinpoint more of what he liked about science, which ended up being math. Ian explains how math began to become a passion for him, and he eventually tried to pursue a career in it by teaching. He discovered...

Grace Cassy, and Associate Fellow from Ten Eleven Ventures sits down to share her career path, getting her to where she is now. Grace spent 10 years in the UK Diplomatic Service, working on global security policy in Asia, Europe, and the Americas. Earlier in her career she was an advisor to Prime Minister Tony Blair, specializing in Asia and national security. She also co-founded Epsilon Advisory...

Jeffrey Wheatman, Cyber Risk Evangelist, from Black Kite joins to share his amazing story. As a strategic thought leader with extensive expertise in cybersecurity, Jeffrey Wheatman is regarded foremost as an expert in guiding public sector clients and Fortune 500 companies in connection with their cyber risk management programs. In his current role as Cyber Risk Evangelist at Black Kite, Jeffrey w...

Nicole Sundin, a Chief Product Officer from Axio sits down to discuss her career path and what it is like to be a woman in the cybersecurity field. As a UX leader, Nicole has devoted her entire career to building awareness around the benefits of usable security and human-centered security to the broader cybersecurity community. She also shares some of her background as she moved her way up the lat...

This week, we welcome Jennifer Reed, a Principal Solutions Architect at Amazon Web Services (AWS) to sit down and share her amazing story. After Jennifer graduated high school, she immediately went into Marine Corps training, which she shared was a shock to her because she was the only woman when she got out into the fleet and every single place that she went. She eventually moved on from the mili...

Susan Hinrichs, Chief Scientist at Aviatrix sits down to share her story, with over 30 years in experience spanning a variety of networking and security disciplines and has held leadership and academic roles, she sits down to discuss her amazing career. Earlier in her career, Susan served as System Architect at Cisco where she spent nine years designing and developing Centri Firewall and a variety...

Suzie Squier, President of the Retail and Hospitality ISAC, or Information Sharing and Analysis Center, sits down to share her incredible story starting to get her into the cyber community. She first started getting into PR through an internship she did in college, then moved around a few times gaining experience everywhere she went. Suzie shares some wise advice, discussing not only her managing...

This week, we are joined by Ted Wagner, Chief Information Security Officer at SAP National Security Services, or SAP NS2. Ted sits down to share his story on how he got introduced into the industry and why he chose this as a career path. He went straight into the Armyas a second lieutenant in the artillery field after high school, which after his time was up he decided to move on and started worki...

This week our guest is Merritt Baer, a Field CISO from Lacework, and a cloud security unicorn, sits down to share her incredible story working through the ranks to get to where she is today. Before working at Lacework Merritt served in the Office of the CISO at Amazon Web Services, as part of a small elite team that formed a Deputy CISO. She provided technical cloud security guidance to AWS’ large...

Karl Mattson, CISO at Noname Security, joins us to share his story. Having started out as a "military brat," traveling the world as the child of a Marine, Karl later joined the Army not long after high school. In the Army, Karl was assigned the career field of intelligence analyst and started working with the NSA. He says that was a real career break. Following the Army, Karl worked in the financi...

Caroline Wong, Chief Strategy Officer from Cobalt sits down to share her story of her 15+ years in cybersecurity leadership, including practitioner, product, and consulting roles. As well as being a member of our very own Hash Table, Caroline also authored the popular textbook, Security Metrics: A Beginner's Guide and teachers cybersecurity courses on LinkedIn Learning as well as hosts the Humans...

This week's guest is Rick Doten, the VP of Information Security at Centene Corporation, he sits down to share his story and provide wise words of wisdom after conquering this industry for 30 years. Rick, like many others in the field started off not knowing what he wanted to do, so he tried out a few things, including doing in-user training and desktop support, eventually evolving to do systems an...

This week, we welcome Dina Haines, an Industry Partnership Manager with the National Security Agency's Cybersecurity Collaboration Center. Dina found from a young age, she was always interested in the field, taking after her father who worked in the space industry, paving the way for her to fall in love with the field. She worked in the private sector for a bit, moving around every now and again,...

This week, our guest is Luke Vander Linden, Vice President of Membership & Marketing from RH-ISAC and host of the RH-ISAC podcast here at the CyberWire. Luke sits down to share his story all the way back to when he was a very young age where he was a child model and actor to where he is now working in the cyber industry. Luke fell into the marketing field after his time as a child actor, where he...

Dr. Georgianna Shea, the Chief Technologist at the Transformative Cyber Innovation Lab at the Foundations for Defensive Democracies (FDD) sits down to share her incredible story, moving around to different roles and how that has lead her to where she is today. Her careers have taken her to many different states throughout the years, as she has learned and grew into the roles she took on, from Hawa...

Manuel Hepfer a cybersecurity researcher from ISTARI sits down to share his story with us. Manuel shares as a kid he was very interested in STEM, and in school he remembered a programming class that he fell in love which made him want to pursue a career in cyber. Studying at the University of Oxford he began working towards acquiring a degree in Cybersecurity and Strategic Management. He found res...

Morgan Adamski from the National Security Agency (NSA) sits down to talk about her path to getting into cybersecurity. Remembering back to when she was a kid, she recalls using old technology to chat with friends online, that's where it all began for Morgan. She shares how in high school she fell in love with the concept of debating and being on a team. During her high school career, 9/11 occurred...

Don Welch, Chief Information Officer from New York University sits down to share his exciting start into his cyber career. Much like many other people who started in this industry, Don went into the military, which is where it all started for him. He was told he needed to take two specialties, and so along with mechanical engineering, he decided to go into computer science as well. After taking hi...

Jennifer Addie, COO and CWO from VentureScope and MACH37 Cyber Accelerator sits down to share her incredible story, bringing creativity into the cyber community. Growing up Jennifer always loved the human side of things, and learning that she had a knack for computers helped her to realize what type of field she wanted to pursue as an adult. She started working jobs dealing in programming, databas...

Eric Tillman, Chief Intelligence Officer at N2K Networks sits down and shares his incredibly creative journey. Eric loved being creative from a young age. When he started to think about a career he wanted to incorporate his love of creativity into his love for tech and turn it into an intelligence career. Eric started by joining the Navy, which set him on this path to work in cyber where he shared...

Liji Samuel from NSA sits down to share her exciting career path through the years until she found a job working for as Chief of Standards and Certification at NSA's Cyber Collaboration Center. She starts by sharing that she had always wanted to work in the STEM field, explaining that growing up she was surrounded with older cousins who were choosing STEM careers and it became an interesting topic...

Slavik Markovich, CEO of Descope joins Dave to discuss his career as a serial entrepreneur. Before Descope, he co-founded and was the CEO of Demisto, a leader in the SOAR industry, which was acquired by Palo Alto Networks in 2019 for $560M, where he then served as SVP of Products. Before co-founding Demisto, Slavik was VP & CTO of database technologies at McAfee. He joined McAfee via the acquisiti...