Top 20 Women Leaders in Cybersecurity

According to research, we can conclude that women now make up more than 25 percent of the cybersecurity workforce. It’s significant to inform the general public that women are taking control, valued and respected, in the fight against cyber criminals.

There are series of associations, Twitter lists, LinkedIn groups, and meetups for women in cybersecurity. Here are some of them:

Nicole Eagan

Bio: Co-Chief Executive Officer @ Darktrace

Nicole Eagan recognized the cybersecurity company as a global leader in AI cyber defense. With over 20 years of experience, Nicole has formerly taken up roles at HP, Quest Software, Peregrine Systems as well as Oracle. Eagan has familiarized disruptive machine learning to enterprises of all sizes, which earned herself a wide recognition as an AI thought leader. By creating the autonomous response market, Darktrace breaks a cyber threat from causing damage every few seconds with its AI algorithms, which have steadily sensed attacks that have never been seen before, which traditional security implements simply could not handle.

Active channels: Twitter, LinkedIn 

Leslie Jones

Bio: Chief Human Resources Officer at Coalfire

Experienced HR professional, Leslie Jones adds over 21 years of experience to her role as Chief Human Resources Officer at Coalfire. Coalfire which has its headquarters in Westminster, Colorado is a cybersecurity provider that supports private and public sector companies prevent threats and manage risks. Jones joined the company about four years ago and since then, has become a fundamental factor of the executive team. She’s been steadily admired for her leadership role in evolving an inclusive culture at the company, which makes employees comfortable. Jones’ role involves recruiting programs, training and development, compensation and benefits, talent management, and creating a vibrant company culture. Prior to joining Coalfire, Jones was the vice president of HR at Benefitfocus, HR director at Blackbaud, and spent nine years at Sun Microsystems as its senior HR manager and HR business partner.

 Active channels: Facebook, LinkedIn

Dr. Magda Chelly

Head of Cyber Risk Consulting @ Marsh Asia

She is leading the cyber business for an international Fortune 500 insurance-broking firm in Asia. Dr. Magda is an activist for women in security. She founded Women of Security Chapter (WoSEC) in Singapore. WoSEC supports female professionals in cybersecurity. She is a member of the Advisory Board for the Executive Summit Black Hat Asia. She co-founded Responsible Cyber Pte. Ltd., a Singapore-based start-up with NUS Enterprise, the entrepreneurial arm of the National University of Singapore, and Singtel Innov8, the venture capital arm of the Singtel Group, as its shareholders. The company has been valued at 7 Million SGD in May 2020.Dr. Chelly defines herself as a Cyber-Feminist! 

Active channels:Twitter, LinkedIn

Hue Harguindeguy

Bio: Chief Financial Officer @ Guardian Analytics

Hue Harguindeguy was allotted as the Co-CEO and Chief Financial Officer at Guardian Analytics in 2016. By acquiring over 25 years of experience in the financial sector, Hue has held positions at Murdock & Associates, QSpace, Symmetricom, Atlantis Computing, and Optus Partners. Notably, Hue has also been involved in four IPOs as well as five mergers and acquisitions. Founded in 2005, the Mount View, California-based Company has been at the forefront of leveraging machine learning and advanced big data analytics methodologies to mitigate fraud risk and stop the sophisticated criminal attacks targeting retail, commercial, and enterprise banking clients. Hue attributed her early success to having great mentors.

Active channels: LinkedIn

Chua Sock Koong

Bio: Group Chief Executive Officer @ Singtel

Until the beginning of 2021, Chua Sock Koong was the Group Chief Executive Officer for Singtel, a multinational telecommunications corporation. After she announced her retirement towards the end of 2020, Chua was set to take on the position of Senior Advisor to the Chairman to assist in the transition. Singtel which has its headquartes in Singapore has 140 years of operating experience and even played a pivotal role in the country’s development as a major communications hub. Singtel is currently the largest mobile network operator in Singapore, serving over 700 million mobile customers around the world. With a global staff exceeding 23,000, Singtel is also the second-largest company by market capitalization to be listed on the Singapore Exchange.

Appointed Group CEO in 2007, Chua has become one of Asia’s most powerful businesswomen. With the advent of the digital economy in recent years, she has been driving Singtel’s ongoing transformation from a traditional telco into a communications technology company. Chua holds a Bachelor of Accountancy degree from the University of Singapore, having graduated with first honors.

 Active channels: Twitter

Laura Nielsen

Bio: Managing Director @ Ankura

Laura Nielsen is a Managing Director at Ankura, which is a consulting firm that offers discernments in multiple domains, from government issues to complex business tasks, to legal proceedings. The firm which is based in Washington, D.C., significantly gained a worldwide impression sometime in 2018 when it attained Navigant’s disputes, forensics, and legal technology (DFLT) segment and transaction advisory services (TAS) practice for a whopping $470 million. Despite being launched in 2014, the company has developed to a labor force of about over 1,500 employees in over 30 offices, with annual revenues of more than $400 million. Ankura was also acknowledged as one of the five fastest-growing consulting companies in the year 2019 by Consulting Magazine. The Washington Business Journal also ranked Ankura #8 on its list of Fastest Growing Companies in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area. This happened to be the second consecutive year that Ankura had been recognized in this category.

Nielsen brings to her role over 19 years of experience performing complex data management and analysis, including database design and development, data conversion, and data analysis services. She has run a great number of cybersecurity investigation and data mining analysis incidents and has analyzed complex financial and accounting issues for corporate clienteles.

Active channels: Her Website, LinkedIn

Lisa Schreiber

Bio: Chief Customer Success Officer @ Blackline

Lisa is a international technology and customer success executive who brings a thorough vision of IT customer and product challenges and solutions to start-ups through Fortune 500 companies including Oracle, GoldenGate, Charles Schwab and Apple. Lisa is very committed to making a huge change, meeting business goals and breaking through difficult conditions and competing priorities. Lisa Schreiber was the Chief Customer Success Officer at Forcepoint, a global software company headquartered in Austin, Texas which was launched in 1994. The company has went through several substantial changes over the years, eventually going public in 2000 at the peak of the dot-com bubble. They offer their clients protection against security threats and data breaches via web and email. She is well-known for her desire surrounding the customer experience as both a technology product user and leader who uses this perspective to create strategy that leads to bigger customer satisfaction and sales.

Active channels: Her Website, Twitter, LinkedIn

Lisa Parcella

Bio: Vice President of Product Management & Marketing @ Security Innovation

Lisa Parcella is the Vice President of Product Management and Marketing at Security Innovation, an innovator in software security. Even with leveraging interactive training modules, reinforcement assets, and optional integrated phishing solutions, Security Innovation is committed to safeguarding and protecting delicate data in the most perplexing digital environments. Ever since 2002, top establishments such as Microsoft, Sony, IBM, FedEx, GM, Disney, and Dell have relied on Security Innovation’s world-class expertise. Around the year 2019, the company reached several notable mileposts, comprising licensing its computer-based training products to nearly 3 million users, while also being named a Visionary in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Security Awareness Computer-Based Training.

With a wide range background in security awareness, product management, marketing communications, and academia, Lisa leverages her vast knowledge to design and deliver wide-ranging security-focused products and educational solutions for the company’s miscellaneous client base. Lisa is the Marketing, Social Media and PR Lead for Women in Security and Privacy (WISP).

 Active channels: LinkedIn

Julie Gable

Bio:  Chief Operating Officer @ TBConsulting

Julie Gable is the Chief Operating Officer of TBConsulting, a company which focusses in assisting companies leverage technology to increase performance. The company, which was founded in 1996, has attained considerable growth through a series of strong leadership decisions, intermittent rebranding, and calculated shifts. TBConsulting’s Chief Operating Officer, Julie Gable, brings about close to two decades of IT experience to her role. As an executive leader in this industry, she is accountable for all matters, whether big and minor.

As COO of TBConsulting, Gable is responsible for driving power against strategic goals by providing organizational simplicity and keeping the executive leadership team concentrated and responsible. She is a senior IT and business leader with close to 20 years of experience in directing continued growth in the technology sector. Earlier, she was an executive at Accenture, where she constantly established her ability to master a wide diversity of roles, from team leadership to product development.

Active channels: LinkedIn

 Sagit Manor

Bio: Chief Executive Officer @ Nyotron

 Nyotron is a cybersecurity company that doesn’t study past attacks or the behavior of hackers. This unconventional tactic is what attracted Manor to the company initially. After working in business for about ten years, Manor’s life turned around with a meeting with former Israeli ethical hacker, Nir Gaist, who introduced her to PARANOID. It was an unruly system that turned every other principle of cybersecurity upside down by postulating that “stopping threats has nothing to do with knowing them.” Manor emulates the company’s passion and trust in their avant-garde yet ground-breaking progression. Since joining the cybersecurity company in 2017, Manor has made her spot by associating with Ingram Micro, which led to the tech giant investing $10 million in Nyotron. Before Nyotron, Manor held roles at Ernst & Young, as the chief financial officer at Lipman and as the vice president and chief financial officer at Verifone. Sagit also led an IPO at NASDAQ, as well as several calculated acquisitions.

Active channels: Her Website, Twitter, LinkedIn

Noelle Hardy

Bio: Vice President of Services at Aspect Security

Industry veteran Noelle Hardy has been the Vice President of Services at Aspect Security for about 20 years. In this title role, Hardy has set sales goals, evaluated data, and established training programs for organizations’ sales representatives. At Aspect, she was majorly involved in designing and executing a prospectus and disposition scheme to meet the requests or demands of a wide range of companies helping them monitor their staff’s progress with its eLearning solution. Aspect was recently acquired by Ernst & Young (EY), which will increase its attention and broad coverage on application and product security. Before joining Aspect, Hardy was the senior product manager at Symantec, senior director of security services at Exodus Communications, and senior security consultant at Trusted Information Systems.

Active channels: Her Website, Twitter, LinkedIn

Saryu Nayyar

Bio: Chief Executive Officer @ Gurucul

Internationally recognized cybersecurity expert, Saryu Nayyar is the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Gurucul, a leader in unified security and risk analytics. With over 15-years of experience in the information security, access management, identity, and as well security risk management sectors, Saryu has held down roles at some of the most respected corporations. She is also a speaker, published author (Borderless Behavior Analytics – Who’s Inside? What’re They Doing?), and a member of the Forbes Technology Council. Saryu was formerly a founding member of Vaau, an enterprise role-management start-up acquired by Sun Microsystems, and has held management roles in product strategy for both Sun and Oracle and Sun Microsystems. While Saryu grew up, her mother was her role model. By tackling gender barriers as a judge in the Supreme Court of India, Saryu was stirred to follow suit and stirred her path into obtaining a successful profession in cybersecurity. This is why she’s also a passionate advocate for women in technology. Saryu has been renowned for her exceptional vision and also her distinctive capacity to ascertain market opportunities and build advanced technologies to discourse them.

Active channels: Twitter, LinkedIn

Ola Sergatchov

Bio: Vice President of Corporate Strategy @ Guardicore

Experienced cybersecurity executive, Ola Sergatchov joined Guardicore as Vice President of Corporate Strategy about two years ago. She heads the company’s corporate strategy and go-to-market initiatives to steer in development on a global scale. Having over 18 years of experience in the industry, Ola has a distinctive blend of technical skills, strategic experience, and an understanding of the services industry. Remarkably, she’s the company’s first female executive leader. Headquartered in Tel Aviv, Guardicore is a data center and cloud security company that protects organizations’ core assets using flexible, quickly deployed, and easy to understand micro-segmentation controls. Ola has a proven track record of implementing business and product strategy for big enterprises as well as developing technology start-ups. Earlier before Guardicore, Ola was at IBM as the global portfolio strategy director, where she successfully led the brand and go-to-market strategies for the Threat-Aware Identity and Access Management offerings. She also worked at Oracle, Secerno, Ness Technologies, Matrix, and Itemfield. Ola has also delivered industry analysts briefings and research papers, working with Gartner, Forrester, IDC, and KuppingerCole analyst firms.

Active channels: Twitter, LinkedIn

Parisa Tabriz

Bio: Security Expert @ Google

Parisa Tabriz popularly tagged as “Security Princess” for Google not only runs the team that pen tests Google’s own security, but is also responsible for keeping Google users and customers safe, particularly when it comes to Chrome. She recently gave one of the opening keynotes at Black Hat 2018, where she talked about throwing out the rule book to break the status quo in the security industry and the significance of trying to find new ways to win the digital security war.

Active channels: Her Website, Twitter, LinkedIn

Eva Galperin   

Bio: Director of Cybersecurity, EFF

Eva is a top notch Cyber woman with the Electronic Freedom Foundation (EFF), a non-profit organization that fights for people’s digital privacy, security and internet civil liberties. Eva Galperin is EFF’s Director of Cybersecurity and a digital privacy and free speech warrior. She ran EFF’s Tor Relay Challenge, a campaign to acquire more people to set up and run Tor relays in an effort to guarantee the tool can protect your privacy online. Recently, Galperin spoke at Black Hat 2016 about government-sponsored attacks and malware. Galperin became interested in computers at an early age through her father, who was a computer security specialist. When she got to the age of 12, her father made a desktop for her on his Unix/Solaris computer and she became active in Usenet discussion areas about science fiction novels and playing interactive text games, and she later became active in web development.

Active channels: Her Website, Twitter

Window Synder

Bio: Founder and CEO @ Thistle Technologies

Window Synder has led the security efforts of many of the major technology corporations in the US, aiding as the Chief Security Officer (CSO) of companies like Mozilla, Apple, Fastly and now Intel’s Platform Security Division. Around the year 2000s, Microsoft launched their Trustworthy Computing division to start to create a culture of security in their organization.

In 2006, Snyder organized Microsoft’s Blue Hat Security Conference, which was their way of opening a transparent dialog with security researchers by sponsoring a Microsoft hosted Black Hat-like event. Since then, Snyder has also played a crucial role in helping many other huge companies grow the security of their products, and has helped the industry embrace external security researchers who help improve your company’s products.

Active channels: Her Website, Twitter, LinkedIn

Amanda Rousseau

Bio: Offensive Security Researcher at Facebook

Popularly known online as “MalwareUnicorn,” Amanda Rousseau is a malware reverse engineer and forensic expert, who has explored malware at many premium malware security companies like FireEye and Endgame. She has a deep, system-level knowledge required to reverse engineer sophisticated malware today, and Rousseau has that in spades. She also gained some experience working as a forensic examiner for the Department of Defense. She is also known for placing unicorns in her error code.

Active channels: Her Website, Twitter, LinkedIn

Ambareen Siraj

Bio: Founder and Chair of the Women in Cybersecurity Initiative

Dr. Ambareen Siraj is a professor of Computer Science at Tennessee Tech University (TTU). Siraj works mostly behind the scenes doing one of the most important jobs in infosec which is educating, mentoring and inspiring the next generation of women in cybersecurity. She is the director of the NSA/DHS accredited Cybersecurity Education, Research and Outreach Center at TTU, and also founded the Women in CyberSecurity Initiative (WiCyS) a non-profit organization devoted to bringing women together in cybersecurity and mentoring the next generation.

She led Information Assurance Programs within the Air Force Pentagon Communications Agency and overseas. Nagel holds a Bachelor of Science degree in business management from the University of Phoenix and received her Master of Science degree in information assurance from Norwich University. She also holds both CISSP and PMP certifications.

Active channels: Her Website, Twitter, LinkedIn

Joanna Rutkowska

Bio: Computer Security Researcher @ Golem Foundation

Joanna Rutkowska is one of the first female computer security researchers to watch out for. She was at a Black Hat security conference in 2006, where she released her team’s seminal research about “Blue Pill,” a hardware hypervisor rootkit. Creating a hardware hypervisor rootkit not only requires cleverness, but technical system and state of the art skills far beyond what an average coder might have. Rutkowska proved that and more to the Black Hat audience that year. She went on to help build a safe, containerized operating system (OS) called Qubes OS and now focuses on cloud security as the CSO of Golem Network.

Active channels: Her Website, Twitter, LinkedIn

Yuval Lazar

Bio: Top security researcher @ Pcysys

As a top security researcher at Pcysys, Yuval Lazar leads the Israeli startup’s research and development in the fight against malicious hackers. Founded in 2015 and headquartered in Petah Tikva, the company established an agentless and fully automated network penetration testing platform that assesses and reduces corporate cybersecurity risk. For the last two-and-a-half years Pcysys has relied on Lazar to discover dynamic vulnerabilities, learn how they can be exploited in a live enterprise network as well as undertake the incredibly intricate task of automating known intrusion techniques used by red teams and attack campaigns without damaging operational workflows. Lazar’s expertise devises from the four years she spent in the Israel Defense Forces. She was recruited to the top intelligence unit, 8200, where she began as an intelligence analyst before spearheading cyber operations vital to Israeli security as a network security researcher. It isn’t just Lazar’s like-mindedness for being a team player that makes her a talented thought leader but her ability to go the extra mile. Determined to play a crucial role in balancing the gender-disparity in tech, Lazar devotes her free time to impart young girls about cybersecurity and computer science.

Active channels: LinkedIn

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Reference: itservicesreport,

thesoftwarereport,

Qubes OS,

Golem Network,

Women in CyberSecurity Initiative (WiCyS),

Microsoft’s Blue Hat Security Conference

Electronic Freedom Foundation (EFF

Wikipedia

Topionetworks

Neil Okikiolu

Neil Okikiolu

Neil is a Computer Scientist, Roboticist, and the founder of Simius Technologies Inc.