The 5th Annual Women in Cybersecurity Conference (WiCyS) will be held March 23-24 in Chicago.
WiCyS was organized in 2013 for the purpose of encouraging and supporting women in cybersecurity. With support from industry, government, and academia, WiCyS works to to recruit, retain, and advance women in cybersecurity. And it creates opportunities for women in cybersecurity to share knowledge and experience. Through its community and activities, WiCyS works to raise awareness about the importance and nature of cybersecurity careers.
Speakers at the March WiCyS conference will include Susan Landau, Tufts University, and Celeste Matarazzo, from Lawrence Livermore Laboratory. Landau works at the intersection of cybersecurity, national security, law, and policy. Matarazzo is the Principal Investigator for a large LLNL-funded strategic initiative research project in cyber security situational awareness.
Landau’s talk, “Listening In: Cybersecurity in an Insecure Age”, will consider the tension between privacy and law enforcement, most notably the case in which the FBI tried to compel Apple to open the locked iPhone of a San Bernardino terrorist. Landau will also talk about Russian interference in the U.S. and French presidential elections.
Matarazzo will provide an overview and discuss recent trends facing computer security researchers and practitioners. She will describe recent work at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to enable analysis of computer networks, a job that depends on understanding time-varying patterns of system behaviors, such as the actions and connections between components.
Experts say that with cybercrime on the rise, the demand for more cybersecurity professionals is increasing. Not surprisingly, salaries for cybersecurity professionals are expected to rise by 7 percent in 2018. WiCyS believes that women need to be encouraged to train for and fill that demand. With women making up half the labor force, it only makes sense to tap into that resource.