Inside Cyber • Danyetta Magana

Women of STEM
2 min readMay 8, 2019

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(President, Covenant Security Solutions || DC, USA)

“How I ended up in cybersecurity? Serendipity! I saw a job announcement about an Information Security position in the military. I thought, this must be interesting, I’ll apply! Low and behold, many months later they hired me. When I came, the first thing they said was, ‘Hey, our senior engineer is leaving, would you want to take his job?’ I said yes. They brought me a box of books and told me, ‘Read these and get some on-the-job training from the previous person. You’re our cyber person now. Best of luck.’ At first I tried to get out cybersecurity — it was just so overwhelming. There wasn’t anyone to tell me what to do, I just had the books. But I slowly started understanding I was at the bleeding edge of something no one talks about. In 1998 all these tech and internet companies were booming, but no one spoke about how to protect their tech. I realized I was building capacity in a field no one else knew about, and continued to dig deeper.

Cybersecurity’s finally getting the attention it should have had when I first started. Companies are realizing how vulnerable they can be. For me, it’s really interesting to work on an active cybersecurity incident: how did hackers get in, how can we keep them out? How are they moving through our network as we’re chasing them? This is why I pursued the design side: how do you design a system that’s less susceptible to hacking? And it’s so much more than just the tech. You have to think about things like how much you should be paying your employees, given they handle sensitive information every day.

Besides design, educating people is my passion. I think there are two parts to this. First, the average individual needs a better understanding of what cybersecurity means to them. We lack a Smokey the Bear — everyone knows about preventing forest fires because of Smokey. A lot of people only think about cybersecurity after they’ve been the victim of an attack. Second, we need more women, more minorities in general in this field. We need diverse perspectives so we don’t create something we think is helping people, but may actually be hurting.”

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