Tribe of Hackers

46Wendy Nather

“There are definitely people from different ethnicities, women, or whoever being judged as not capable, whereas other people are given the benefit of the doubt automatically. So, those minorities may need to prove themselves a lot more, and that’s when the education can come in handy.”

Twitter: @wendynather • Website: idoneous-security.blogspot.com

Wendy Nather is a mild-mannered threat intelligence research director by day and a former analyst and CISO in the public and private sectors. Warning: This interview may contain snark.

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

The biggest one from my perspective is the idea that all of the users of our systems need to know as much as we do about security. Back in the early days, in the ‘70s and ‘80s, when we were first building these systems, we built them for each other. And everyone in the community had pretty much the same level of knowledge. When you designed something, you were designing it for yourself and for people who knew the same things you did. The description of an intuitive interface really made a lot of assumptions that somebody else had the same background that you did, and therefore, they would be able to intuit what you meant with something. That’s completely different now. The rest of the world is using technology, and none of them understand security or IT ...