Career Notes

Yasmin Abdi: Find your community. [Security Engineer]

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 Snapchat, which had the security aspect and security composure that she wanted. In her role at Snapchat, she gets to work with her team to help take down all kinds of bad content and keep up the platform’s integrity, and found she fell in love with the work along the way. Yasmin shares the sage advice to grow your community as much as you can, saying to"form a community of like-minded people. People that you can bounce ideas off of, people that can help support you when times are low. Find mentors, find people that you aspire to be like, and really find that community of people." We thank Yasmin for sharing her story.

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Charlie Moore: Pilot to head honcho in cyber. [Cyber Command]

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 Force career, he was a member of the last class entering into the Academy that was not issued desktop computers. Charlie discusses how this changed as the year went on and how that impacted his career both in and out of the military. Charlie worked for different companies over the years to further his career and his goals, and discusses how his flying career has helped him and says, "I was extremely passionate about the flying aspect of my career for 25 years and I became even more passionate about operating in this space." We thank Charlie for sharing his story with us.

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Miriam Wugmeister: Technology's not as complicated as you think. [Data Security]

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 before switching to philosophy. She then got asked to work on a project relating to a company’s privacy and fell in love with the subject matter, deciding then to pursue it as a career. Miriam mentions how technology is not as complicated as tech people might have you think. She hopes she can advertise a tech degree for young women and men looking to get into the field, as well as making sure she "encourages women and diverse lawyers to, uh, come into this area to thrive." We thank Miriam for sharing her story with us.

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Gene Fay: Lead from the front. [CEO]

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 started to really learn about technology. Gene talks about leading from the front and how a good leader will always do so, even if he has to lead from two different fronts. He said "it's kind of the two fronts, sometimes you've gotta put on the leadership face, and believe it, that, that you can get, and we can get through any situation, cuz sometimes you're, your gut feelings are, might be wrong and, or it's a moment in time and if you can help the team grind through that situation, it does get better." We thank Gene for sharing his story with us.

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Teresa Rothaar: Outwork the competition. [Analyst]

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 moved to being a writer at Keeper, finding she wanted to spread out and try more, so she ended up becoming an analyst while still doing writing on the side. She quotes David Duchovny in an interview once, explaining how sometimes you need to keep your head down and outwork others. Teresa said this resonated with her, saying, "that's how I went from a foreclosure box on the porch to where I am now. I have a good job and, and I have a career and I have a really good career and I absolutely love it." We thank Teresa for sharing her story.

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