My Nine Year Journey into Cyber Security

I’ve had a longstanding interest in cyber security that’s spanned nine years.

The first time that cyber security landed firmly on my radar was during the fall semester of 2013, when I was a senior at Iowa State University and finishing my degree in Global Resources Systems (which is a major that focuses on international agriculture). At the time, I was taking a class where our professor would open each lecture by asking students to talk about the most striking news that they’d read that day.

Another student stood and spoke about how there was a terrible famine going on in part of the world. She shared a call to action and encouraged everyone to send aid.

Once she was done, I raised my hand and the professor called on me.

I got up and, in all seriousness, told the class of agriculture students that we needed to be paying attention to hackers because Lego had hired hackers who went on to save their business. (Please note that I couldn’t find the exact article I read, but the book Brick by Brick: How Lego Rewrote the Rules of Innovation and Conquered the Global Toy Industry addresses that story.)

The class was silent. My professor let the pause stand, then with a smile he said, “okay, who else has news to share?” The lecture moved on, but I stood by my stance that hackers would become increasingly important, no matter which industry you were in.

In the years following, I continued paying attention to cyber security. Key memories that stand out include:

• In 2016, I read Countdown to Zero Day: Stuxnet and the Launch of the World’s First Digital Weapon; and was awestruck by the creators’ sophisticated use of technology and their deep understanding of psychology, as well as sobered by the implications of Stuxnet’s inadvertent release into the wild.
• In 2017, I worked for a company named MoneyGram and remember Wayne McGurk, their CISO at the time, talk about WannaCry. Later that year, I read blogs analyzing both Petya and NotPetya. From then on, I started paying more attention to cyber security in the news and looked at who was behind hacks, what their motivations were and who the targets were.
• In April of this year, my job title changed from “Relationship Manager” to “Mid-Market Sales Executive.” As part of the shift, I was asked to focus on business development for the cyber security space. In an effort to better understand the industry, I: began studying for the CompTIA Security+ certification; going to Denver Cloud Security Alliance networking events; and doing informational interviews with industry professionals.

Over the course of hours of studying and conversations with experts, my instincts started saying that the timing was right to move into the cyber security industry. Once that realization clicked, I started working on making those dreams a reality.