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Emily is the Artemis Red Team lead and community engagement manager at Synack. 

It’s past time for the cybersecurity industry to confront our diversity crisis as we work to close a talent gap that stands at 700,000 unfilled positions in the U.S. alone.

The Diana Initiative is dedicated to solving this national security challenge, and we at Synack are proud to support the nonprofit’s marquee event in Las Vegas next month as a Rainbow Sponsor. 

At the conference, I’ll also be sharing hard-won lessons from my own experience fostering a community for women, trans and nonbinary people to champion a more inclusive cyber workforce. I hope you’ll join me and Synack’s senior director of community Ryan Rutan, either in-person or virtual (for free), on Aug. 10 at 4 p.m. PST for our talk on Red-Teaming Cyber’s Diversity Problem at the Westin Las Vegas.

We’ll be discussing the origins of our Artemis Red Team, in which we combined mentorship opportunities, education resources and even a bit of game theory to elevate underrepresented voices in cybersecurity. The program launched late last year as a sub-community of our Synack Red Team, a group of 1,500+ top-notch security researchers who hail from an array of diverse cultures and backgrounds. 

Since then, the issue of diversity in cybersecurity has taken on renewed urgency as hacking threats continue to evolve and the global cyber skills shortage shows no sign of letting up. Camille Stewart Gloster, the White House’s newly appointed Deputy National Cyber Director for Technology and Ecosystem Security, put it well last week at a cyber workforce summit: 

“If we don’t invest in diversifying the workforce – in identifying voices that are not heard in the work – it impacts not only our workforce shortage and our ability to meet the demands on cybersecurity careers; it affects the efficacy of the work we are doing,” she said, calling it an “imperative to invest in diversity.”

In the world of offensive security and penetration testing, we have our work cut out for us. Red teams have traditionally lagged behind other cybersecurity arenas in terms of accessibility, diversity and equity. 

It’s high time to change that, and it will take all our collective ideas to do so. At The Diana Initiative, we hope we can inspire you to pursue your own programs for removing barriers to create a more inclusive community of cybersecurity professionals. And for those who may want to join the Artemis Red Team to see firsthand what we’re all about, we’ll be eager to meet you. 

See you in Vegas! Follow us on Twitter @ArtemisRedTeam and our hashtag #womenofthehunt.

The post Diversity as a Cybersecurity Imperative – Synack at the Diana Initiative appeared first on Synack.

This morning, Synack gathered a distinguished panel of women in cybersecurity to share their perspectives on the cybersecurity talent gap and offer lessons for supporting the next generation of women leaders.

Men still outnumber women by three to one in the cybersecurity industry, according to a recent (ISC)² report, despite evidence that a more diverse workforce drives better business and security outcomes. While executives at many organizations have acknowledged the problem, they’ve often struggled to find actionable solutions to address this talent gap.

At Fogo de Chão, steps away from the RSA Conference in San Francisco, Synack hosted Kiersten Todt, Chief of Staff at the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency; Betsy Wille, Chief Information Security Officer, Abbott; Tiffany Gates, Senior Managing Director for the National Security Portfolio at Accenture Federal Services; and Edna Conway, VP, Security and Risk Officer, Azure Hardware Systems and Infrastructure at Microsoft, for an intimate conversation moderated by Jill Aitoro, SVP of Content Strategy at the CyberRisk Alliance.

Among the insights from the panel: It’s one thing to hire top talent, it’s another to make women feel like they belong at an organization. And security leaders will need to shake things up to meet aggressive goals like CISA’s plan to have women represent 50% of the agency’s work force by 2030, up from about 36% now.

“We have to be ambitious. We have to be disruptive, because the only way we’re going to get there is by undoing some of the things we’ve done today,” Todt said.

Other key takeaways from Synack’s Celebrating Women in Cyber Breakfast:

Start early

 “We need to be bringing this terminology, this language, to kids in elementary school,” Todt said. “We have to surround them with this field so that they’re able to pull these factors in and grow up with it, so when they’re in high school, they can see the interest they have in these areas.”

Educational institutions will have to move fast to meet the talent needs of a rapidly evolving sector like cybersecurity.  

“I do think there’s a huge opportunity to grow this field much more substantively than we have, because it actually encompasses everything that we do,” Todt said. “There is no greater field that should truly represent the planet.”

Empower advocates

Gates of Accenture, who described herself as “terrible” with numbers, reached out to mentors in a range of fields while forging her own career path.

“Don’t flop toward someone who is just like you,” she said. “I want to be mentored by someone who was in the finance shop, just to better understand the kinds of obstacles and challenges they were dealing with.”

Conway, who said she’s currently a mentor to 14 people, pointed out that advocates like her “need to listen more than we speak, because each of our colleagues comes to the table with something different.”

Build a different kind of pipeline

Heavy turnover in the cybersecurity field has opened important conversations on alternative hiring pipelines, said Wille of Abbott. “We’re in better company than maybe we were a couple years ago in pushing the idea that the traditional means of education are not going to be the only places we can look. We’ve seen that improve,” she said.

Wille pointed out that a few months after starting work at Abbott, she was able to onboard someone who showed initiative but had no college degree on file because the company had enabled that level of hire. The employee has since been promoted, and Wille said she would “hire 10” just like her if she could.

Still, challenges persist in areas like security clearances, which can be integral to a federal cybersecurity career but trip up many candidates.

“When we talk about how hard it is to find women that we can bring in, now take 20% of that available pool,” Gates said. “That is what I have to work with, because the number of cleared resources in this community just decimates the number of women that I have available to choose from.”

Commit to learning

 “Talent doesn’t come in one container, it doesn’t come with one linear trajectory,” Todt said. “We have to do a better job opening up the aperture.”

Poorly written or overly demanding job descriptions can turn away prospective candidates at the front door. Instilling the courage to apply in the first place is key, but that’s not the end of the story.

“It’s not just to have confidence, but quite frankly to step up and be willing to do the work to figure out what you need to learn and go learn it,” said Conway, who pointed out that she has a degree in medieval renaissance literature but built her career in tech by continuously asking questions. “The burden falls on each and every one of us… Reach out, pull up, help, kick in the derriere when needed and do it with care, do it with humility, and you’ll be amazed what happens. We are a powerful force together: Never forget that.”

For more information about how Synack is tackling the cybersecurity talent gap, check out our white paper “Solving the Cyber Talent Gap with Diverse Expertise.”

The post Building a Bigger Tent in Cybersecurity: Lessons from Synack’s Celebrating Women in Cyber Breakfast appeared first on Synack.

Synack’s Courageous Women in Security initiative was developed to bring female security leaders and executives at all levels together to empower each other to use our great talent to have a bigger impact at our organizations and in our  industries, while also having balance in our lives that all humans need. These events, while previously held in person over lively conversation and a glass of champagne in one hand, pivoted like the rest of the world to virtual over the last year. 

Although our lives shifted dramatically during the global pandemic, we made sure to continue the impactful, engaging and thoughtful conversations centered around women, first and foremost, and our careers in cybersecurity.

Igniting a new conversation, our most recent Courageous Women’s event centered on the future of work and how women can help drive change to build a more inclusive work environment and honing in on the current WFH environment. 

Joined by our very own Aisling MacRunnels, Chief Business & Growth Officer and the ladies at Synack, we explored discussions around the pros and cons of disciplined routines, and shared thoughts and brainstormed solutions together while discussing the future of work and how women can help drive change to build a more inclusive work environment.

Women’s roles during the pandemic have made media headlines. I am the prime example. An urban mother, wife and dedicated to my career, the burden placed on women during the pandemic across the country with the majority of schools being closed for nearly a year certainly caused an uproar and exodus (even I contemplated moving to Texas!). 

Bringing women together from different parts of the country and even a few from Europe, we all shared a common belief that although this year was challenging, it pushed us all to varying levels of growth. It challenged us to communicate better with our families, be more vocal and intentional in our security careers, and understand how we thrive as individuals – and how we do not. While WFH opened doors for a few, some yearned for the glory days of office culture and collaborating with teams in person. The daily commute of course was the least missed! 

I personally yearn for the days of yesterday, and although this past year has brought challenges as well as triumphs, I just can’t wait to be back in an office setting, brainstorming ideas in the conference room and connecting with other Synackers over lunch or walking past their desk. I miss the energy, the camaraderie, and flow of information and learning. While it’s been nice to be home, the dog barking when my nest doorbell goes off, limited childcare options in San Francisco (literally the last to open in the Bay Area) and no escaping the fog during my office commute has made me feel like the spark inside me has dimmed. 

Others echoed this sentiment. Shared during our conversation from an attendee “I don’t want for anything and yet I’m missing something” spoke volumes and you could see the head’s nod in approval. 

I applaud the Courageous Women in our network who rose to the occasion and every single woman in our network deserves a medal of perseverance and grit in their professional lives and personal lives. Women need and should continue to have a voice around the future of work and lead the conversation. 

With the COVID-19 vaccine rollout well underway and companies like Salesforce making headlines allowing some employees to return to the office, we can’t help but wonder what this means for us… as women, as leaders, as mothers, as partners, as humans…

Conversations about disciplined routines and distributed work will intensify in 2021. Now’s the time for us to speak up if we want to make an impact for the future of work as Courageous Women and lead the conversation within our cybersecurity industry. 

I look forward to our next event where we will hone in more on a cybersecurity topic with one of our guest speakers and reconnect with a lot of the women in our network. Time to unmute – let’s continue to talk ladies! Join us on LinkedIn 

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