Last week, I had the pleasure of talking to Tripwire’s own marketing specialist, Cindy Valladares. Marketing fits a valuable and overlooked need in the cybersecurity field. Cindy’s creative talent for bringing out the best in people helps Tripwire shine in this industry.

This time, I got to chat with pen testing whiz Evie Andrew. Enjoy!

Kim Crawley: What is your role in cybersecurity and how did you get into it?

Evie Andrew: I guess I’m just your average delivery penetration tester! I do the bread-and-butter stuff that most client-facing pen testers do, from web apps, to Windows networks, to the boring audit stuff. I guess the thing I wake up in the morning for, though, is to do the creative side of offensive security. I love red teaming, social engineering, and malware (like really putting yourself in the character of a villain, I guess I have a nasty streak deep down inside somewhere.) I love to learn new things, too, so I think the work suits me pretty well!

As for how I got into the business, I think I’m fairly atypical in that I wasn’t really a teenage hacker like you hear in the stories. I only really learned how to program in university during a summer, and I found the penetration testing team through work in UK national security. My journey up to that point was far from straightforward, though. I’ve had a pretty heavy academic background, and I’ve always loved to throw myself into things that seem like a huge challenge at the time. I started off with a financial math degree, believe it or not, then scientific computing on GPU, then computational neuroscience research, (I LOVE brains!) and finally to consulting for a well-known defense contractor. A pretty messy and chaotic path, but (Read more...)