Last time, I had the opportunity of speaking with Avi. Avi’s not a woman, but they’re a badass hacker with a natural intuition for cybersecurity that has been put to excellent use.

This time, I had the pleasure of speaking with Susan Ballestero. She has unique experience with working in a security operations center and being an information security professional from Costa Rica.

Kim Crawley: Hi Susan! Please tell me about what you do and how you got there.

Susan Ballestero: I’m currently a senior security analyst in a security operations center.

I have been in love with information security since I was 15 years old. My computer got infected after inserting a floppy disk. I found it amazing that I was infected with a virus; I bragged about at high school, and since then, I have been reading. I did not have internet at home, so I had to go to the public library to read books about infosec. After working for a service desk on network and connectivity and supply chain IT , I managed to get a job as junior analyst at the SOC. It was really hard because I had to try several times to get the job.

KC: What do people misunderstand about how SOCs work?

SB: When it comes to non-infosec people, they think SOC people know everything about security and IT. However, I have seen this from people who already work in infosec. They don’t value the work SOC analysts do; most of the time, SOC jobs are the entry level when it comes to creating a career path in infosec. That’s the reason we don’t get the visibility we would like to get when we have to deal with senior analysts from other teams within security operations. (Read more...)