Over the past 20 years, Lysa Myers has become a highly recognized information security expert, educating people at all levels of experience in how to improve security. She was featured in the book, “Women Know Cyber: 100 Fascinating Females Fighting Cybercrime,” written by Steve Morgan and Di Freeze of Cybersecurity Ventures.
Most recently, Lysa was a security researcher with security vendor ESET. She enjoys educating people about security issues in a light-hearted, honest and approachable way through talking with the media and writing articles.
Lysa is also dedicated to improving diversity within the technology industry as a way to help make secure devices and services that are useful for a larger segment of the population. She joined us on the Look Left @ Marketing Podcast with Davida Dinerman. They touched on the cyber security industry, her career and the mini-farm and food forest Lysa operates with her spouse. Here are some of the highlights:
- The prospect of transitioning into cybersecurity from another career is a lot more difficult than it once was: “There's an expectation of having certifications and degrees and that sort of thing, where there wasn’t any sort of security degree back when I was first getting started. That just wasn’t a thing, and there was barely any understanding of certifications at that point. During the dot.com days, it was all hand son deck. Anyone who had any sort of inclination or aptitude was brought in. Not all those people stayed after the dot.com crash, but there was an expectation that people were just exploring this. Whereas, now, there seems to be a little bit more rigidity about ‘you have to have XYZ experience’ before you even get an entry-level position.”
- Cybersecurity impacts everyone, so the information around it should be digestible to a wider audience: “Data sharing is a bit restrictive for non-experts in the cybersecurity industry. Something I’ve heard from people time and time again is, ‘How am I supposed to get this information if I don’t have this information?’ So, I think there is a lot of room for people who can explain things well. There’s a lot of really technical, scary information out there that is important to a lot more people than actually understand it. So, the more we’re able to make that understandable to the average person, the better security’s going to be for all of us.”
- Lack of diversity will hold the cybersecurity industry back. Lysa compares it to amphibians and fruits: “Both frogs and bananas are dealing with infections that are wiping out a large number of individuals. Bananas, having a monoculture of exactly one genotype, are having a much harder time of surviving its infection issues than frogs are, because they have a diverse gene pool. So, certain individuals are developing resistance to the infection that’s affecting them. Likewise, in security, we need to have a representation of all the population ... because that informs threat modeling. And if you lack that personal element of threat modeling, then you’re always going to run up against, ‘Oops, I didn’t think of that’ moments.”
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