Mark Montgomery
I got into cyber… through my final job in the Navy and my first job in the Senate. My last job in the Navy was as Director of Operations, or J-3, at U.S. Indo-Pacific Command. In that role, I led the day-to-day operations and operational war planning across all services in a very large area […]
Alexandra Guenther
I got into Cyber … by leveraging my non-cyber skill sets. As an engineer with nearly 10 years of experience, I have spent most of my career working in IT and a great deal of those years generating new work through proposal writing, management, and transition. I was well known for tailoring proposals to fit a variety […]
Kris Lovejoy
I got into cyber… through sheer luck. I was asked to take the MS Proxy Server exam so that I could install and configure what was considered a “firewall” at the time. Voila – I became a security person. The experience that set me up for success… was being a mom to 4 kids. It’s […]
Maril Vernon
I got into cyber… through first joining the Nevada Air National Guard. I then started networking myself on LinkedIn because at the time I knew nothing about cyber but everything about growing a social media presence. From there, luckily Reno being the small cyber talent pool that it is (and before a mostly remote workforce) […]
Alex Keedy
I got interested in cyber by… taking a cybersecurity class during graduate school. Then I interned at the Kentucky Office of Homeland Security in their cybersecurity division before starting my first real job at Booz Allen Hamilton in McLean, Virginia. The experience that set me up for success… was having a mentor who trusted in me […]
Meghan Maneval
I got into cyber… Like many in the industry, my journey into cybersecurity was not a direct path. I actually began my college career as an Interior Design major! However, after a semester of C’s in art classes, I realized I wasn’t quite cut out for it. I quickly changed my major and earned my […]
Mary Beth Borgwing
I got into cyber… I entered the cybersecurity sector by accident prior to 9/11, being asked to come into a healthcare single sign-on company that Hewlett-Packard (HP) was spinning out, Sentillion. That was IT security before we called it cyber. I was on the board and their CFO, and I understood that this was a […]
Amy Williams
I got into cyber through… arguably a precursor to cyber which was Accounting Information Systems (AIS), a field that focused on understanding internal corporate networks and associated potential risks to business data. I started out working in AIS before the graphical interface of the internet (aka the World Wide Web) turned everyone’s data-sharing networks into supply […]
Matt Ireland
I got into cyber… as a high school student, I was eager to learn (hack) the typing classroom’s Novell Network. Starting with a printout of commands, I just worked through them one at a time – self-learning what each command did. Building the foundational blocks to figure out how things worked. As I learned how […]
Katea Murray
I got into cyber…after starting as an intern working as a software developer for SAIC (now Leidos) one summer. After my first summer, I returned as an intern, and I was asked to support a project out of the Intelligence Community (IC) organization. The project allowed us to not only explore a diverse range of […]