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 Salt Lake City, Utah in 2002. She shares how she was able to rise through the ranks to get to where she is now. Dawn talks about how she wasn't ready to retire quite yet because she ..read more

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 first ever computer and falling in love with it. After graduating from Queens University with a degree in information technology, he joined British Telecommunications or BT, where he got to put his n ..read more

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 signing up for an internship program that she was able to get into, which she says was a pivotal change for her that provided her the chance to begin her career. She shares the advice that if anyone i ..read more

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 him to getting his first job. After his first job, he moved onto other big name companies like Walmart, Alltel, and Gartner, and landing  ..read more

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 with the new career path she had made for herself. She got herself a job at Sophos and that's where she learned about cybersecurity. Now she discusses cyber and space in her new podcast, combining he ..read more

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 to go in another direction, which led her to cyber. She started teaching herself programming and found she was very good at it. Now that she works in cyber, she says "You, you have to know yourself, k ..read more

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. His experience in the military inspired him to learn more about the industry and jump to the private sector. Fast forward years later, he co-founded his company to help address security gaps seen ..read more

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, eventually getting into the Canadian government. While there, she held the position of CISO for the Canadian election in 2015 when Justin Trudeau was elected, but she knew she wanted to try something ..read more

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 biochemist and law student. Eventually she found her passion as a translator, saying that "doing the translator role, I wanted to get into international marketing and I was going on to get my deg ..read more

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 involved with novoShield. She share's that being a woman in this industry can be tough and so she shares some advice, saying "so you have to be very focused and to find the right niche to bring som ..read more