Career Notes

Major General Lorna Mahlock, Deputy Director for Combat Support from the National Security Agency (NSA) sits down with Dave to discuss her long and impressive career leading up to her working for one of the most prestigious security agencies. Originally born in Kingston, Jamaica, Lorna immigrated to Brooklyn, New York and enlisted in the United States Marine Corps as a field radio operator. She sh...

Nadir Izrael, co-founder and CTO from Armis, sits down to share his story. Nadir started his love of cyber when he became a software developer at the age of 12. He always had a passion for making things work better and asking questions. Once he joined the 8200 unit in Israel, he was able to focus his interests on physics, which led him to making the discovery of wanting to start his own business....

Galit Lubetzky Sharon, Co-Founder and CTO of Wing Security sits down to share her story and how years in the business lead her to be where she is now. Galit shares her insights from her experiences co-founding her company and bringing it out of stealth mode in early 2022, including why she saw the need for Wing Security and what lessons she learned in the process of founding and launching the comp...

Stacy Dunn, a Senior Solutions Engineer from the SANS Institute sits down and shares what it is like to work through her own adversity to get to be where she is today. Stacy shares some of her experiences as a woman with ADHD working in an IT career and explains her tips for other neurodiverse people in the field. After working in a wide array of positions in different fields, she wanted to go bac...

Dawn Cappelli, OT CERT Director at Dragos, sits down to share what she has learned after her 25+ year career in the industry. She recalls wanting to have been a rockstar when she grew up, now she refers to herself as the fairy godmother of security. She shares some of the amazing things she got to work on throughout her career, including working with the Secret Service when the Olympics came to Sa...

Steve Benton, Vice President at Anomali Threat Research & GM Belfast, sits down to share his story as a cybersecurity expert with a surplus of strategic leadership experience across cyber and physical security rooted in substantial operational directorship and accountability. Steve shares his beginnings, where he wanted to grow up to be a rockstar, slowly moving into the world of tech with his fir...

Shelley Ma, Incident Response Lead at Coalition sits down to share her story, starting all the way back when she was a kid and fell in love with playing the game "Neopets" that ended up paving the way for her future in cybersecurity. After starting this journey, she shares how she became intrigued with crime and mystery shows, which ultimately spawned an interest in forensic science. She ended up...

Perry Carpenter, Chief Evangelist and Strategy Officer at KnowBe4 and host of the 8th Layer Insights podcast, sits down to share his story trying different paths, before ultimately switching over to the cyber industry. After trying to go down the paths of music and law and finding neither were what he wanted to do, he decided to take an internship to get more into computer programming. That led hi...

Maria Varmazis, N2K's Space Correspondent and host of N2K's newest podcast T-Minus, sits down to share her journey on combining her two passions of space and cyber. Maria grew up wanting to be an astronomer, in school she focused on joining anything with technology and enjoyed the classes that made her think. After transferring to a new college, she went into journalism, absolutely falling in love...

Jack Chapman, VP of Threat Intelligence at Egress sits down to share his story on how he found his way into the cybersecurity field as well as his journey creating a cybersecurity company that was successfully acquired. Jack previously co-founded anti-phishing company Aquilai and served as its Chief Technology Officer, working closely with the UK’s intelligence and cyber agency GCHQ to develop cut...

Karen Worstell, Senior Cybersecurity Strategist from VMware, sits down to share her journey and discuss her experience as a woman in cyber. Starting her career off as a chemist, she graduated with bachelor's degrees in chemistry and molecular biology. She then took some time off to be with her family and came back to a science field that was far more advanced than before she had left. She decided...

Alon Jackson, chief executive and Co-founder of Astrix Security, sits down to share his story to rising success. Before being on the vendor side of things, Jackson served in various strategic roles in the Cyber Security Division of the Israeli Military Intel Unit 8200 for more than 8 years, including leading the Cloud Security division and serving as the Head of the Cyber Security R&D Department....

Tanya Janca, CEO and Founder of We Hack Purple, sits down to talk about her exciting path into the field of cybersecurity. Trying several different paths in high school, she soon found she was good at computer science. When it came to picking a college, she knew that was the field she wanted to get into. After college, she was able to use her skills to work at a couple of different organizations,...

Kathleen Smith, CMO from ClearedJobs. Net, sits down to share her story as she remembers having big shoes to fill in her childhood. She strived for greatness at an early age, as her parents told her she would be going to college and would follow strong guidelines to become successful. Kathleen can remember being into the hard sciences when she was in school, which sparked an interest in becoming a...

Bat El Azerad, CEO and Co-founder of mobile phishing protection company novoShield, shares her personal account of her experience as a female leader in the cybersecurity field as well as some insights into how far the industry has come and where it is headed in terms of the gender gap. Bat El speaks about how she grew into her role of becoming a CEO, by sharing where she started and how she got in...

Gabriela Smith-Sherman, Director of the Governance Risk and Compliance Department at MindPoint Group, sits down to share her journey. A former federal agency CISO with over 15 years of experience in leading and implementing comprehensive enterprise cybersecurity programs and initiatives, she is also a disabled US combat veteran who understands the importance of mission and is dedicated to deliveri...

Mike Fey, CEO and co-founder of Island.io, joins to share his story, falling in love with technology and being fascinated by it at a young age. Mike quickly started working for companies where he grew in his role, becoming CTO of McAfee and then GM of the Enterprise business, stepping out to then become president and COO of Blue Coat, which was eventually acquired by Symantec, eventually wanting t...

Rachel Tobac, CEO from SocialProof Security sits down to share her amazing story on becoming what's known in the industry as an ethical hacker and CEO of a company. Rachel shares how she was always fascinated with spy movies and as she grew older that fascination turned into a real desire. Finding out she liked learning how the human brain works, she decided to start off in neuroscience. Wanting a...

Jaden Dicks, a new intern at CyberVista, a company that merged with CyberWire to become N2K Networks, shares his story as a young man growing up trying to get into the cyber community. From a very young age, Jaden hoped to become part of the cybersecurity field, He recalls growing up constantly being surrounded by technology, and now with the help of Urban Alliance, Jaden was able to secure this i...

Yasmin Abdi, a Security Engineering Manager at Snapchat and the CEO and Founder of NoHack, sits down to share her story on how she got to be in her amazing current roles. From a young age, Yasmin was fascinated by the overlap of cybersecurity and crime and law. In her time in college, she was able to intern at big tech companies like Snapchat, Google, and Facebook. She decided to stick with Snapch...

Our guest, Charlie Moore, is a recently retired USAF Lieutenant General who sits down to share his story from flying high in the air to becoming a bigwig in the cyber community. He was most recently the Deputy Commander of the United States Cyber Command, and also spent part of his career as a human factors engineer working on human interfaces for fighter aircraft. When he first began his Air Forc...

Miriam Wugmeister, co-chair of Morrison & Foerster’s Privacy and Data Security practice, sits down to share her in-depth experience and understanding of privacy and data security laws, obligations, and practices across a wide range of industries. She talks about how she grew up not knowing exactly what she wanted to get into as a profession, starting off as a chemical engineering major in college...

Gene Fay, CEO of ThreatX sits down to share his experience rising through the ranks to get to where he is today. He shares how even at a young age he wanted to work in an office and become a businessman, though at the time he did not understand what that entailed. After college he acquired a job that was revolutionizing video editing for post-production studios as well as TV stations, where he sta...

Teresa Rothaar, a governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) analyst at Keeper Security sits down to share her story, from performer to cyber. She fell in love with writing as a young girl, she experimented with writing fanfiction which made her want to grow up to be in the arts. After attending college she found that she was good at math, lighting the way for her to start her cyber career. Teresa mov...

Simone Petrella, CEO of cybersecurity training workforce firm CyberVista, spent her career in the Department of Defense as a threat intelligence analyst before founding CyberVista. She says that running a company has a new set of challenges each day thrown at you. She explains that the way she finds the most success is by letting her team contribute to each matter, and having a say in the decision...