Tribe of Hackers

11Whitney Champion

“We spend countless hours securing things from the more obvious outside attacks, but we don’t always spend enough time auditing who has permission to do what from within, or disaster recovery.”

Twitter: @shortxstack • Website: whitneychampion.com

Whitney Champion is a systems and security architect in South Carolina. She has held numerous roles throughout her career—security engineer, systems engineer, mobile developer, cloud architect, and consulting architect, to name a few. In the last 15 years, she has worked on operations teams, support teams, development teams, and consulting teams in both the private and public sectors, supporting anywhere from a handful of users to hundreds of thousands. No matter the role, security has always been an area of passion and focus.

If there is one myth that you could debunk in cybersecurity, what would it be?

It’s not always the hacker in the black hoodie trying to steal your data, and it’s not always about someone trying to steal your personal information, credit card numbers, or secrets. Sometimes, it’s the teammate who is still getting their feet wet—but has administrative access to all your systems—who accidentally took down or deleted an entire piece of your infrastructure.

We spend countless hours securing things from the more obvious outside attacks, but we don’t always spend enough time auditing who has permission ...