Career Notes N2K Networks

Karl Mattson, CISO at Noname Security, joins us to share his story. Having started out as a "military brat," traveling the world as the child of a Marine, Karl later joined the Army not long after high school. In the Army, Karl was assigned the career field of intelligence analyst and started working with the NSA. He says that was a real career break. Following the Army, Karl worked in the financial services world as a CISO. At Noname, Karl began by building out internal risk and IT functions into a strong, what he calls spectacular team. Karl recommends "deferring gratification as long as possible" when building your career. He says, "People early in their career, looking at government service, those positions don't, you know, make anybody rich overnight, but they are amazing career cornerstones to build on." He closes sharing the importance of relationships. We thank Karl for sharing his story with us.
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Caroline Wong, Chief Strategy Officer from Cobalt sits down to share her story of her 15+ years in cybersecurity leadership, including practitioner, product, and consulting roles. As well as being a member of our very own Hash Table, Caroline also authored the popular textbook, Security Metrics: A Beginner's Guide and teachers cybersecurity courses on LinkedIn Learning as well as hosts the Humans of InfoSec podcast. Caroline's father pushed her to start her career in engineering, she went to UC Berkeley and got accepted into their Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences program. As a college student, she was looking for an internship and found eBay, where she says she worked an entry level position available on the information security team, and says the rest is history. She shares that she loves to teach her peers, and how she would like to be remembered for being a good teacher, saying "I think that my favorite part of the work that I get to do is teaching. Um, and in particular, um, being able to communicate about cybersecurity concepts to a wide audience. I have such tremendous gratitude." We thank Caroline for sharing her story with us.
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This week's guest is Rick Doten, the VP of Information Security at Centene Corporation, he sits down to share his story and provide wise words of wisdom after conquering this industry for 30 years. Rick, like many others in the field started off not knowing what he wanted to do, so he tried out a few things, including doing in-user training and desktop support, eventually evolving to do systems analysis work and designing software. Rick shares that his main day to day roles are spending time helping out the corporate global CISO, CTO, and head of platform within the organization, he shares that his nickname is the neighborhood cat because he's everywhere. Rick shares advice for people getting into the industry for the first time, saying "There is a rainbow of different roles in cyber security, and I feel like I've done all of them in the last 30 years. So there are different things that, that you, the thing that like appeal to you the most because you're going to excel and want to hyper focus on the thing that you really, really are interested in and not the thing that you're not" We thank Rick for sharing his story with us.
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This week, we welcome Dina Haines, an Industry Partnership Manager with the National Security Agency's Cybersecurity Collaboration Center. Dina found from a young age, she was always interested in the field, taking after her father who worked in the space industry, paving the way for her to fall in love with the field. She worked in the private sector for a bit, moving around every now and again, eventually landing the position she works now. Dina says her day to day job is helping the NSA to bend and protect cyberspace by bringing in private industry. She says "I try to spend a lot of time listening and seeing where people, where they're coming from, where they're at, you know, potentially in their career, where they're at in their job that day, and then try to, um, support them and bring them up and, and float the entire boat." We thank Dina for sharing her story with us.
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This week, our guest is Luke Vander Linden, Vice President of Membership & Marketing from RH-ISAC and host of the RH-ISAC podcast here at the CyberWire. Luke sits down to share his story all the way back to when he was a very young age where he was a child model and actor to where he is now working in the cyber industry. Luke fell into the marketing field after his time as a child actor, where he really started to find his passion. After finding his passion, he decided to branch out to different areas in the field, working in public libraries and advocacy groups, this is where he started to really enjoy the prospect of working with individuals who support organizations, which got him started in the RH-ISAC world. Luke shares that he wears many hats these days, working in the podcast business while also working on the leadership team at RH-ISAC. His advice for people getting into this industry is "I think with age comes this knowledge, but also with experiences. So, I mean, to that point, don't be afraid to go out there and fail, give it a shot." We thank Luke for sharing his story with us.
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Dr. Georgianna Shea, the Chief Technologist at the Transformative Cyber Innovation Lab at the Foundations for Defensive Democracies (FDD) sits down to share her incredible story, moving around to different roles and how that has lead her to where she is today. Her careers have taken her to many different states throughout the years, as she has learned and grew into the roles she took on, from Hawaii to D.C., Dr. Shea has done it all. Sharing some advice, Dr. Shea says "My words of wisdom are take advantage of every opportunity and don't wait for anybody. I try to mentor people and I talk to young people a lot, you know, trying to get into the field and, and I see a lot of waiting on other people." She explains that you are able to work on your own to become an expert, and taking that initiative will be the thing to get you to where you want to be. We thank Dr. Georgianna Shea for sharing her story with us.
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