How to grow interest in STEM and create women and minority leaders.
By Caitlin Kalinowski, Facebook Reality Labs
Women, LGBQT+, economically disadvantaged, and other minority groups are vastly underrepresented in STEM, which will negatively impact the future of these fields. Much of the blame lies with ingrained cultural expectations, biased learning curricula, and male-centered cultural expectations and communication. To overcome these oversights, schools, employers, and familial expectations discouraging entry into STEM fields must be addressed in a multi-pronged effort to attract and retain these groups. Much of the solution will lie in education systems, workplaces, communities, and parents utilizing methods to encourage and support girls and minorities as early as elementary school age. Read the full article.
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Do it: no technical background needed.
Q&A with Dr. Rois Ni Thuama, Red Sift
What is the most rewarding part of working in cybersecurity?
Protecting businesses from significant cyber threats is not a cold, commercial transaction. Protecting businesses protects livelihoods, careers, reputations, families, and communities. It has a real world impact. It is not the same as being part of the vaccine program but when businesses take sensible steps to secure their business, making it difficult for the bad actors, it feels as though the good guys are fighting back.
What advice would you give to others considering joining the cybersecurity industry?
Do it. Don't worry if you're not technical, there is room for you in this space. Maybe you have a background in art, we need to be able to communicate complex messages, there is room for you. Maybe your background is languages, the bad guys are communicating in languages other than English. There's room for you. Maybe your background is law, businesses need to protect themselves not only from cyber threats but they need to make sure that any contracts with vendors are fair and reasonable. There's room for you. For cybersecurity to operate, we must all bring our A game to the party. There's room for everyone.
What challenges do you anticipate for future cybersecurity professionals?
There's a huge amount of information in this field, it is only going to grow. It can be tempting to try to grasp it all. But this will lead to burn out. Cybersecurity professionals will need to be disciplined with their discipline, to really be able to interrogate their area to understand it thoroughly, to communicate in their area in a simple and straightforward manner but then give up the reins to other members of the team. Cybersecurity is a team sport, not a solo mission. For cybersecurity professionals to be successful, you will have to rely on your team.
What are common misconceptions people have about the cybersecurity space?
That it is purely a technical role. It is not. The true purpose of cybersecurity is to preserve and protect the corporation’s assets. It is immaterial if the asset is commercially sensitive information or cash. Cybersecurity is risk management and everything we have learned from risk management has some degree of application. We keep hearing that in order to keep a business safe, there must be a broad distribution of responsibility, this means lawyers or legal experts must be involved in the conversation.
4 skeletons to keep locked in your data closet.
By Irena Mroz, archTIS
Today, data is everywhere. Collaboration and file sharing platforms like SharePoint, Office 365, Dropbox, Teams and Slack have made it easier than ever for users to collaborate. Remote work has yielded an even bigger increase in communication with content being created and shared across the enterprise and with third parties: contractors, vendors, and partners. However, with increased collaboration comes data, lots of it – everywhere. It’s no longer just in file shares but is also in emails and chat threads.
While every company may not have skeletons in their data closets that could discredit or embarrass them, there is a lot of sensitive data that every company needs to keep secret. Here’s some advice on how to keep these skeletons locked in the data closet or repository where they belong.
The art of cybersecurity.
By The CyberWire Staff
What do art and cybersecurity have in common? You might not think they share all that much, however, if you have attended any of the CyberWire’s Women in Cybersecurity networking events, you know that many parallels exist. For each event, the CyberWire partners with Maryland Art Place (MAP) to issue a call for artists and commission a special piece by a visual artist identifying as female and living in the Maryland/DC/Virginia region. The selected artist joins us for the evening, shares their perspective on the theme, Creating Connections, and unveils their piece of art. The winning selection is reproduced, signed by the artist, and these commemorative prints are given to guests in attendance. Do you have any of our event prints? Perhaps hanging in your office or home? Please share on social media and tag @thecyberwire and #cyberwomenconnect for all to see.
Past selected artists have included those with not only backgrounds in the arts, but also past careers in physics, mathematics, computer science and engineering. You can see examples of the first five years selected pieces on our event site. Perhaps you, your artistic colleagues or friends could be our next artist? We will be opening the call for artists for the 2022 Women in Cybersecurity reception in the summer of 2022. Stay tuned. In the meantime keep an eye on our Twitter feed for news about the 2022 event and shots of previous years prints.