BBP: My Path to the CISO Chair

Testing, testing. May I have your attention, please. *Ahem* Allow me to introduce myself and this new series of articles for The Ethical Hacker Network. My name is Stephanie, better known as Steph or InfoSteph in the community. I have been working as a security professional for the past year and a half, but I have been in the security industry for 3 and a half years. I’ve been in tech for 6.5 years. In that time, I held two different security positions, but both were corporate security roles with a lot of responsibility and steep learning curves. It has been a wild ride, one with failures and errors galore. However, I wouldn’t change my past for anything. As for my future… spoiler alert… I want to be a CISO, and I have a plan to get there. But before I get into the weeds of all of that, it’s only right that we start from the beginning.

Before I Ever Knew What a CISO Was

“Hello. I’m here to declare my major?” I stood nervously in the extremely small office belonging to the Dean’s administrative assistant. I had just gone through several different offices to accomplish different tasks and this was my last stop for the day. After three years in a journalism program and deciding that journalism was not for me, I hoped that this new declaration would bring me the happiness and fulfillment I needed.  I was taking a leap of faith and fighting against my insecurities by choosing Computer Science as my major. I thought it would be too complicated or that I wouldn’t be able to understand what was being taught. However, a lack of an alternative had me in a bit of a corner.

“Yes, sure. Please, sit,” the administrative assistant (Read more...)