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Want a career in cyber? Meet the women owning it
These are cybersecurity's trailblazing women to follow
These are cybersecurity's trailblazing women to follow
This International Women’s Day, we celebrate the makers, creators and doers working to close tech’s gender gap. Sure, the industry has a long way to go, but these women’s success shows we’re making progress. Essential reading if you’re looking at a career in the industry.
Are you thinking about a career in cybersecurity but put off by the lack of women in the industry? There’s good news: the tides are changing. What was a male-dominated industry is transforming – slowly but surely. We’re celebrating the women who’ve made it.
Diversity benefits our teams, yet encouraging more women to join is a constant challenge in the tech industry. Now is the time for change. Kaspersky’s Women in Tech report found 57 percent agree there are now more women in IT and tech roles than two years ago. Plus, one in two believe that remote working has improved gender equality. This might seem like slow progress, but it’s a positive sign for championing women in cybersecurity. And these trailblazers are leading the way.
Follow Theresa: @TrackerPayton
How many people can say that? Formerly of the White House, Theresa is CEO of Fortalice – a cybersecurity firm specializing in protecting small-to-medium-sized businesses and a team member on the CBS reality TV show Hunted. Here’s her view on what it’s like being a woman working in cybersecurity.
Follow Katie: @k8em0
Katie’s been programming computers since she was eight. Since then, she’s helped Microsoft develop its Bug Bounty program, developed Hack the Pentagon for the US Department of Defence and founded a cybersecurity agency, Luta Security. So what’s the secret behind her success?
Follow Eva: @evacide
Eva set up the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a collection of technologists and activists to defend free speech online and fight illegal surveillance. Now she’s a leading voice in the fight against stalkerware. Meet Eva in Tomorrow Unlocked series Defenders of Digital.
Follow Magda: @m49D4ch3lly
Magda is a top international cybersecurity influencer. Global leader of the year at the Women in IT Awards 2017, Founder of Woman in Cyber group, and works with numerous non-profit focus groups. If that wasn’t enough, she leads her own company, Responsible Cyber. But what makes her tick?
Follow Shira: @Shirastweet
Cybersecurity expert, influencer and font of cyber knowledge – Shira Rubinoff is President of SecureMySocial. Here she breaks down the importance of cybersecurity training.
Follow Tyler: @TylerCohenWood
Tyler is a globally-recognized cyber-authority. She’s spent time developing cybersecurity initiatives for the White House, Department of Defence and the Defense Intelligence Agency (as their Cyber Deputy Chief.) Here she talks about the cyber-apocalypse.
Follow Jane: @JaneFrankland
Security entrepreneur and author of In Security: Why a Failure to Attract and Retain Women in Cybersecurity is Making Us All Less Safe – Jane Frankland is empowering more women to become cybersecurity leaders in company boardrooms worldwide. Here she talks about Industry 4.0.
Follow Anne-Marie: @aimafidon
Tech speaker and author, Anne-Marie, CEO of training organization Stemettes, is leading the wave by encouraging girls and young women to pursue cyber careers. Read an interview with Anne-Marie in Secure Futures by Kaspersky magazine.
This is just a tiny snapshot of the incredible women helping to close tech’s gender gap globally. Here are a few more women to get on your radar.
Lesley Carhart: Principal Threat Analyst at Dragos, with two decades of threat hunting experience. She was named “Top Woman in Cybersecurity” in 2017.
Follow Lesley: @hacks4pancakes
Noushin Shabab: Senior Security Researcher at Kaspersky who’s helping to connect, support and inspire women in security across Australia through the Australian Women in Security Network.
Follow Noushin: @NoushinShbb
Parisa Tabriz: The self-styled “Security Princess” running Google’s security testing labs.
Follow Parisa: @laparisa
And not forgetting…
Rebecca Base: ‘A maverick and a catalyst for women in cybersecurity,’ widely respected as a security technology pioneer, known for her valued role as a mentor to young people and young companies in cyber. Rebecca is no longer with us, but her legacy remains.
Looking for more inspiration on how women are overcoming gender biases in tech and cybersecurity? Explore Kaspersky’s Empower Women project.
Celebrate the women who shaped tech history
Did you know Florence Nightingale created a technique to fight infections in hospitals two hundred years ago? Or that, after the US Civil War ended in 1865, the government hired war widows as ‘human computers’? From calculating comet showers to cracking Japanese naval codes and more, here are the historic women that shaped today’s tech. You might be surprised.
We didn’t always have snazzy Macbook Pros and Google Pixels. Way back, in 1613 to be exact, the word ‘computer’ was coined which meant ‘those who compute,’ or a person who calculates information. These sacred folk were champions of sums and all that came with it, like Mina Rees, an American mathematician and computing pioneer born on 2nd August 1902. As well as receiving at least 18 honorary doctorates and other accolades, Rees’ crowning moment came in 1969 when the 120,000-member American Association for the Advancement of Science elected her president proving, according to the New York Times, that “scientific creativity was not just for men.”.But in a world of driverless cars and sex robots, it seems pioneers like Mina, and many other women like her, go unnoticed by the next generation of female cyber talent. A big claim? Not according to a recent report by PwC, in which 78 percent of students can’t name any famous woman working in tech.
It’s no secret: tech isn’t the easiest industry for women to break into. Women account for 5 percent of leadership positions in the tech sector, while only 10 percent of women working in a technology role work in a female-majority team, compared to 48 percent working in a male-majority team.But things are changing. According to Kaspersky’s recent Women in Tech report, 56 percent say more women are working in IT than two years ago. Plus, one in two agree that remote working is improving gender equality. Win.
History is brimming with influential women who pioneered new ways to calculate and compute. To mark Mina Rees’ birthday 119 years ago, and as more young women contemplate a career in tech, we celebrate the women who helped make computing history.
Many historians see Alan Turing’s work cracking the Nazi ‘Enigma’ code as critical to ending World War II. You may not know that 75 percent of the codebreakers at Bletchley Park (the institution Turing worked at) supporting him were women. The film ‘The Imitation Game’ is a Hollywood interpretation. But what’s their real story?
1940s Hollywood actress Hedy Lamarr co-invented a frequency hopping method that could control torpedoes remotely, and the signal couldn’t be tracked or jammed. By the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, the design was installed on Navy ships. The technology later made its way into everyday tech like Bluetooth and Wifi.
Grace Hopper was the first person to create a compiler for a programming language. She’s widely miscredited with coining the term ‘bug’ when a moth caused her computer to malfunction, though she did develop COBOL (Common Business Oriented Language) and devised new symbolic ways to write computer code.
1843. Britain builds the Houses of Parliament, Charles Dickens publishes ‘A Christmas Carol’ and Ada Lovelace writes history’s first computer program. The annual Ada Lovelace Day celebrates women’s achievements in science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM) and encourages girls and young women to follow in her path. Here’s her story, in Jedi format.
Hundreds of engineers, pilots and scientists were behind the 1969 moon landing. But in truth, it wouldn’t have happened without Margaret Hamilton. Why? Because she programmed Apollo’s onboard flight software.
Long before apps like Bumble and Tinder got everyone swiping right for love, in 1964, Joan Ball set up the world’s first computer-based matchmaking program, St. James Computer Dating Service. She sent surveys to people asking what they were looking for in a partner; then, she ran those through a computer program to find matches before sending the names and addresses to those who’d been paired. Imagine that?
As the leader of the Network Information Centre, supported by her mostly female team, Elizabeth Feinler, also known as ‘Jake,’ created ARPANET’s directory. This was effectively the first internet directory in 1969, decades before we all started to Google. What had initially been a centralized location for web domains quickly transformed into a way of classifying and discovering the worldwide web.
When you see the iconic trash symbol on your Apple Mac, thank Susan Kare. She worked with Steve Jobs to design the original icons, making home computers user-friendly.
Want more inspiring stories on how today’s women in tech are progressing? Visit Kaspersky’s Empower Women.
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The 7 tech ads that slayed Super Bowl 2021
This year's Super Bowl was like a showroom for future tech
This year's Super Bowl was like a showroom for future tech
It’s that time of the year again where commercials get super creative – brands like Cadillac, Logitech and more gave their view on tech in 2021.
(see above)
Which ones changed your perceptions? Which do you think should be confined to the ‘obsolete tech’ heap? Share your feedback with us on Twitter or Facebook and make sure to vote for your favorite video!
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The final instalment of our series hacker:HUNTER Olympic Destroyer examines how Pyeongchang winter Olympics hackers put smokescreen to misdirect cybersecurity analysts. But through the fog, analysts realized the culprit wasn’t who you might expect.
If successful, the 2018 Pyeongchang cyberattack could have cost billions of dollars, leaving a canceled Olympics and a geopolitical disaster in its wake. Their deceptive methods meant the cybercriminals nearly got away with it. Why did they want to point the analysts at another group? And who was behind it all?
Cybercriminals don’t leave a calling card, but they do leave evidence. The art of finding and using that evidence to find the culprit is known as threat attribution.
Threat attribution is forensic analysis for advanced persistent threats (APTs). It analyzes the attackers’ ‘fingerprints,’ such as the style of their code, where they attack and what kinds of organizations they target. Attacks can be matched with the fingerprints of other attacks attributed to specific groups.
Hackers have their own set of tactics, techniques and procedures. Cybersecurity experts can identify threat actors by studying these elements.
In February 2016, hackers attempted to steal $851 million US dollars and siphoned $81 million US dollars from the Central Bank of Bangladesh. The attack was linked to notorious cyber espionage and sabotage group Lazarus Group. Lazarus attacks casinos, financial institutions, and investment and cryptocurrency software developers.
Lazarus has certain targets and ways of attacking: Infecting a website employees of a targeted organization often visit or finding a vulnerability in one of their servers. These are the ‘fingerprints’ used in threat attribution.
Crucially, Lazarus Group is long thought to be linked to North Korea. Olympic Destroyer included a piece of Lazarus’s malware code, but the type of attack didn’t fit. Its fingerprints better matched a cluster of attacks by another group with a very different agenda.
Watch the full video to see if you knew who the hacker was all along.
This APT might not have worked, but over the years, others have. To see what a successful APT looks like, watch Chasing Lazarus: A hunt for the infamous hackers to prevent big bank heists.
AI tech lets disabled gamers smash access barriers
By 2023, there could be over three billion gamers worldwide. But for some people with disabilities, taking part in this wildly popular passion can be frustrating to impossible. Now, one piece of tech is out to make slaying dragons and building civilizations accessible to all. Will it change the future of gaming?
Since the world’s first video game ‘Pong’ appeared in 1958, gaming has evolved in ways never imagined. But game accessibility is still a problem for as many as 30 million people in the US, because they have an impairment that means they come up against accessibility barriers when gaming.
Fridai is changing all that. The voice-activated, AI-powered assistant gives advice on anything gamers with disabilities may need, from hands-free options to being reminded of the game’s objective. In Defenders of Digital series two, episode four, Mark Engelhardt, Fridai’s Co-founder and CEO, talks about how the technology uses AI to create a new interface between humans and machines.
Empowering African women against cyber-harassment
Online abuse and cyber-harassment mean a disproportionate number of women remove themselves from crucial discussions. One not-for-profit is making a change for women in East Africa.
In the digital age, not only do we send videos to friends and sing online karaoke with those we’ve never met, many are using social media to fight for equality. But online harassment, image-based sexual abuse (also called ‘revenge porn’) and cyberattacks can stop women especially from being part of the conversation that leads to real change. These cowardly acts also leave victims feeling embarrassed, ashamed and alone.
Safe Sisters is a fellowship program empowering girls and women, especially human rights activists, journalists and those in the media, to fight online abuse. In Defenders of Digital season two episode five, Safe Sisters’ Immaculate Nabwire explains a landmark Ugandan image-based sexual abuse case that inspires her, the digital threats women in East Africa face and how her team are fighting for change.
Will robots one day satisfy our need for love?
Look into the future of pleasure, lust and connection
Look into the future of pleasure, lust and connection
Until now, scientists and developers have pushed to discover whether artificial intelligence can love humans, and vice versa. Welcome to the age of robot relationships.
In Steven Spielberg’s 2001 blockbuster science fiction film A.I. Artificial Intelligence, a highly advanced robot boy pursues a loving foster human who abandoned him. At the time it seemed far fetched. Today, it looks more like reality.
Imagine Beyond: Build me Somebody to Love looks at how AI is changing the way we look at love, lust and human connection. Could you marry a robot? Will a hunk of metal look after you in your dying days? Let’s see how human machines could become.
Feeling like you’re back to the same-old, job? It’s frustrating when your ideas at work go unrecognized, for reasons outside of your control. What if you were making all the decisions? Do you have what it takes to lead your own tech start-up?
Here are six qualities that make a successful tech entrepreneur, coming from those who’ve broken the mold of what it means to be one.
Christina Morillo – Pexels.com
The tech industry benefits from diversity. But there are still perceived barriers for women, like lack of role models, stereotypes and inflexible working hours. The good news? Change is underway. A new Kaspersky study shows over half of women working in tech feel women are represented in leadership roles, and 7 in 10 feel confident and respected at work.
There’s some way to go to having gender-balanced tech teams: only 1 in 10 work in female-majority teams, while 1 in 2 work in male-majority teams. Let’s be the change we want to see – don’t place limits on what you want to achieve in your career.
Starting a tech business is riddled with uncertainty. You need to be able to make a plan when the goalposts, and the ground beneath your feet, are moving. And you’ll need to be able to adapt to change fast. You’ll never have all the answers, but you’ll still be able to see ways to move forward. Did you know that Tesla and SpaceX, both flagship companies of Elon Musk, came close to failing? The first electric car created by Tesla, the Roadster, had big production problems and SpaceX had many launch failures before its final effort was a success.
Tech entrepreneurs don’t decide their ‘baby’ is the right solution and doggedly cling to it. Stories like that of Elizabeth Holmes – inventor of the blood-test biochip that never existed – show just how destructive hanging onto a dud idea can be.
Great tech entrepreneurs want to solve the problem more than they want to be right about how it’s best solved. They’re more interested in being useful than in being popular.
When you run a start-up, you need to win people over to your idea, time and again. From securing funding to motivating your team, you need to be tireless in inspiring people to give you their best. And you’re not just selling your product, you’re selling yourself.
Contrary to popular belief, leaders don’t need star quality – experience and skills predict success better than charisma. But you do need to make people believe in what you can do.
The famous author and pilot Antoine de Saint-Exupéry once said: “If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.”
Early in the life of your start-up, you’ll need to turn your hand to all kinds of tasks that won’t feel like what you were born to do. If you’re the kind of person who tends to think, ‘that’s not my job,’ or you’ve developed advanced skills in avoiding tasks you don’t like, tech entrepreneurship may not be for you.
Did you know that the search engine and company we know as Google today, has started as a PHD project? At the beginning, the world wide web wasn’t that big. As a matter of fact Larry Page, one of the founders of google collected the links on the web by hand. He didn’t know exactly what to do with it but it seemed to be a good idea, because no one had ever collected the links before. This seems inconceivable today!
Free Creative Stuff – Pexels.com
Gone are the days when entrepreneurs jealously guarded their ideas up until the moment of a giant, glitzy launch. Perfect is the enemy of good. And in tech, it’s usually much easier to get a prototype or beta version out to gauge the response than it is with other kinds of products.
As anyone who’s done user research will tell you, the biggest shortcomings of products often aren’t what the team thinks they are. Testing with real people isn’t a luxury; it saves time and money.
Leading your own start-up almost always means working long hours and testing your skills to their limit. Few succeed, but if you have these six qualities, you have a great chance of being among those who do.
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From Kurils with Love: What the volcano taught us
Nothing could prepare the Kuril Islands’ expedition team and researchers for sight of the devastation from Raikoke’s 2019 volcanic eruption. Renan Ozturk tells how they came to understand something more about nature.
The Kurils, a string of islands dotting the sea between the Sea of Okhotsk and the North Pacific Ocean, are a haven for wildlife and sealife. A group of adventurers and conservationists, including filmmakers Renan Ozturk and Taylor Rees, traveled to the Islands in 2019 to create an adventure documentary full of stunning footage: From Kurils With Love. One event would drastically change the project’s course and open their eyes to something bigger.
Ozturk reflects on what the volcano’s destructive power has in common with the Covid-19 pandemic, and what the cycle of life means for humans and “the true devastation of our lifetimes” – climate change.
The project is seeking donations to support research that will help protect the islands. Watch the full documentary and show your support.
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SpaceX's Transporter-1-Mission makes history
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