Episode 42: CEO of Women's Society of Cyberjutsu and Cybersecurity Leader Mari Galloway

Like many others we have observed first hand the positive changes in the cybersecurity community being enabled by Mari Galloway. In this OODAcast we look beyond those changes to find out what makes her tick, revealing lessons applicable to professionals in any stage of their career.

Mari is the CEO and a founding board member for the Women's Society of Cyberjutsu (WSC), one of the fastest growing 501c3 non-profit cybersecurity communities. WSC is dedicated to bringing more women and girls to cyber and does so by providing its members with the resources and support required to enter and advance as a cybersecurity professional.

Mari is a practitioner herself with an academic background in technology, multiple certifications, and, more importantly, years of direct hands on experience in mitigating risk and enabling the smooth functioning of enterprise operations.

She began her cyber career with Accenture where she excelled as a Network Engineer, and also worked at several government agencies, in the casino industry, and now in the cybersecurity platform community. Her experience spans network design and security architecture, risk assessments, vulnerability management, incident response and policy development.

Mari is also the inaugural ISC2 Diversity Award winner for 2019.

In this OODAcast we discuss:

The Women's Society of Cyberjutsu and how businesses and individuals can get involved. We also discuss the niche of technical hands-on experiences that WSC focuses on.

The Wicked6 Cybergames eSports event during Blackhat and Def Con, which turned cybersecurity into a spectator sport.

Her background and how she seeks to find balance between academic training (which she continues), training/certifications (which she pursues with vigor). This discussion brings out a character trait that also applies across her work and leadership of WSC, persistence.

The foundational story behind WSC. The society was started out of a need for more hands on training. The fist workshop was a fast track to linux mastery session. Other workshops followed, including sessions on reverse engineering. WSC has now expanded nationwide as a community and offers a wide range of courses including sessions that help young girls learn and grow and also help those who already have a career.

As an example, she mentions Recorded Future was just brought on as a sponsor, which lets them support the cause and also gives them exposure to great upcoming talent.

Mari's approach to leadership and decision-making (her approach at WSC and as a practitioner is a collegial one, but focused on results and benefits to others).

Her view of the cyber threat today and in the near future (which includes more of the social engineering and phishing threats that play to our emotions). Ransomware and insider threats are also still growing.