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Women in Information Security: Jessica Hebenstreit

Last time, I had the pleasure of speaking with Roxy Dee. Her expertise is in vulnerability management, and she also loves to pay it forward by giving away books to her lucky Twitter followers.

This time I got to speak with Jessica Hebenstreit. She’s worn an awful lot of hats in the cybersecurity field, and now she’s a senior security consultant. She also told me a bit more about the Diana Initiative.

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

Jessica Hebenstreit: Currently for my day job, I am a senior security consultant at a Security Firm. I specialize in assessing security operations programs for our clients and then designing and building their programs to achieve their goals. I work with them to ensure alignment with their overall organization and desired maturity.

I’ve been doing information security for nearly twenty years. I started as an intern at Motorola doing a little bit of everything and have worked for a lot of companies in various roles. I’ve done everything from Security Operations (before it was really called that) to Architecture, Risk Management, Incident Response, and so on. I’m fortunate that when I started everyone kind of did everything, so I’ve had exposure to a lot of different areas. Most folks starting today make a specialization decision pretty early in their careers out of necessity.

For my non-day job, I am the Chief Operation Officer for The Diana Initiative. I believe strongly in community involvement and have been working on diversity, inclusion and pipeline challenges for several years.

KC: Do you think that having worked in a variety of infosec roles helps you in any particular infosec role?

JH: Yes, I think the higher on the management (Read more...)