16Kim Crawley

“This is purely anecdotal, but I would say more than half of the cyber threats that corporations face involve social engineering at some level or another.”

Closeup image of the blog writer "Kim Crawley."

Twitter: @kim_crawley • Websites: threatvector.cylance.com/en_us/contributors/kim-crawley and www.linkedin.com/in/kimcrawley

Kim Crawley is a regular contributor to the corporate blogs for Tripwire, Cylance, Venafi, AlienVault, and Comodo. She has previously written for Sophos’s Naked Security and CSO and has also appeared in 2600 Magazine. She loves JRPGs, black clothing, Swedish Fish candy, her weird boyfriend, and her equally weird platonic friends. Sometimes while researching cybersecurity topics, she can go through three cans of Red Bull in one sitting.

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

That it’s all highly esoterically technical. Computer programming code and quantum computer science definitely pertain to cybersecurity. But I’m someone with the mind of a sociologist, so I’m really happy to write about topics like social engineering, scams, and cyberattacks that involve deceiving human beings. Or how effective UI design can help users use their software in a more secure way. Both of those areas have a lot to do with psychology and very little, if anything, to do with cryptographic mathematics, you know?

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