From IaaS to ICS: Translating Engineering to English in Cyber

Traditionally, people have rarely gone to school for cybersecurity. Yet it's an industry that impacts every facet of the world, and its importance is growing by the minute. Within it, you can "fight the bad guys and make the world a better place in some way," says Maggie Macalpine. MacAlpine, a Cyber Engagement Lead at the Center for Threat-Informed Defense at MITRE Engenuity, was an english major who has found a passion for bridging knowledge gaps across cybersecurity. In an industry where jargon itself can cause confusion and miscommunication, she has found a niche in translating engineering-speak to english - her self-described superpower. Beginning her career at a startup focusing on election security at a time when there wasn’t such widespread concern as to whether or not security was an issue. Now, at the Center for Threat-Informed Defense where the goal is to advance the state of the art state of practicing threat informed defense, a philosophical approach to cybersecurity that focuses on what an adversary is doing rather than traditional defensive compliances and "checking the boxes" within traditional cybersecurity. MacAlpine shares how the relative newness of cybersecurity, and the innovation needed to protect information using online machines is a completely new terrain.