Dhri Stocks | Edited MC

Dhriti P. Stocks: it brought both of those two things together. So last year, last October, the center announced the Global 50x50 Initiative to put 50% women in cybersecurity by the year 2050. Um, and that was the first thing they told me when they said, you could come join this mission. Um, and I said, I've spent. 20 years uplifting women and girls in STEM and advocating for populations who have historically faced barriers. And this brings it together in a global scale to actually uplift people in a profession that I believe is going to be the profession. No matter where you are in the world, you're gonna need cyber skills, cyber knowledge, cyber possibilities.

Sean Martin: Ah, just like that. I know. Three, we've made it. We've made it. We finally have a seat. Mm-hmm. And a chance to chat. Yes. All about the center at ISC2. I love it. Yeah. So good. And I have my, my coffee from, [00:01:00] from Kelly. Thank you Kelly. Mm-hmm. You've been amazing supporting me, uh, this these past few days. Cheers. Cheers to Kelly. Yes. Cheers to Kelly. Yes. So three busy week, A lot of rebranding mm-hmm. Taking place as well. Yeah. Uh, doesn't change the mission though. Right. So we're gonna get into all that fun stuff, but a little bit about your journey to the center is about a year now, right? Yes. You've been in the center, so right about a year.

Sean Martin: Um, so the long story is very long, but I'll tell you the short version. Alright. So I have spent my whole career in nonprofit organizations and I got into nonprofit organizations because I did a, an AmeriCorps. Um, and so I was really, really excited about the opportunity to work in the community and to make things better for people who just historically lacked opportunity. Um, and so I came through my career working in youth serving organizations and kind of predominantly two priority mission areas. The first is I worked with organizations trying to uplift women and girls in stem. Um. And so I did things where we were looking at the population and the opportunity for women and girls in STEM driving that awareness and driving that opportunity. When I, I spent some time at the Girl Scouts of Northeast Texas and we built the very first STEM center of excellence in the entire country. Wow. So an entire camp dedicated to STEM learning, STEM opportunity and STEM possibility for young girls. Um, and during that time, you know, again, making sure that. Girls could see themselves in stem because you can't see what you, you can't be what You can't see the second thing That's part of your backstory as well. It is. I'm gonna, we're not gonna spoil that story. Okay. But I wanna ask everybody to find you and hear that story from you. 'cause you, you gave me a snippet of the, the other night and it's a good story. Yeah. So, anyway, sorry to interrupt, but No, all good. You're gonna make a lot of new friends who want to hear that story. I'm excited. I'm excited. So I, uh, so the second, the second place where I. Spent most of my career journey is, uh, giving opportunities to populations who historically just had too many barriers. So in my last role, I worked with an organization that was supporting justice involved youth and for justice involved youth. The barriers are just a wide range of barriers and for youth who have made a decision, a mistake that they're trying to come back from, and they're trying to come into, you know, some sort of job. And some sort of future. They're not just looking for a job to pay the bills, even though that's necessary. They're looking for a job that will result in thriving. And so creating the conditions for thriving was the work that we did. And so between these two mission areas, that is where I spent most of my time and. When I, when I was looking for my next opportunity, I found this opportunity at the center at ISC2 and it brought both of those two things together. So last year, last October, the center announced the Global 50x50 Initiative to put 50% women in cybersecurity by the year 2050. Um, and that was the first thing they told me when they said, you could come join this mission. Um, and I said, I've spent. 20 years uplifting women and girls in STEM and advocating for populations who have historically faced barriers. And this brings it together in a global scale to actually uplift people in a profession that I believe is going to be the profession. No matter where you are in the world, you're gonna need cyber skills, cyber knowledge, cyber possibilities. And so we need to create the conditions where more people see themselves in cybersecurity and importantly. Cybersecurity has all of the perspectives represented at the table so we can actually keep our world safe and secure. Oh, there's always that. Mm-hmm. Somehow seem to be forgetting that. Mm-hmm. Yeah. We need to remember that. I have my pen 50 and 50, 50 by 50. Um, not wearing my badge so you can't see the pen. But anyway, um, 15 years as well. The center has been, been going. What are some of the, some of the results of the 15 years? Yeah, absolutely. So we started out purely just giving scholarships. So the, the center was founded on the belief that, again, that financial access is important and financial barriers exist for different people in different ways. And so we started out by giving scholarships. And so far in our 15 years, we've given about more than 1100 scholarships for cyber access, and that includes access to education, right? So, you know, college associates. S graduate and undergraduate. Um, but also access for certification and education and training, right? So we cover the gamut When it comes to scholarships, we cover your traditional education. We also cover your credentialing, but we also cover that skills building. And how do we make sure that no matter what you need in order to succeed, you have some mechanism to enable that support. Um, and so we started out with that scholarship remit, and then the thing we observed out in the community was that there was education that was necessary. Um, and that was not only education of the public as it relates to, you know, young people, seniors, vulnerable populations, but also education of institutions that are kind of the front facing institutions for. The citizenry, right? Like the true community. Um, and so Cybersecurity Health Check, which is one of our programs, works with small nonprofits and small businesses because those are the organizations that are being targeted, may not realize they're being targeted, may not have an understanding of full understanding of what they need to do in order to stay secure. And sometimes there's a lot of low hanging fruit. And so we mobilize ISC2 volunteers. These are the credentialed experts in the field. We mobilize them to go into these organizations and just kind of walk them through a check of, this is the basics. This is how you are, this is how you're able to stay secure. This is the education that you need. It's a lot of education, but also this is what you can build towards. And then we have partners that actually do those services. And so. For your, you know, my neighborhood coffee shop or, uh, a nonprofit that is a domestic violence shelter. Both of those true examples of organizations that we've served, those are organizations that, you know, they can't allocate $20,000 towards some sort of, you know, cybersecurity intervention, but they have very important PII, they have very important needs, and so they need that support, and so we connect them to resources where they can get access to that for free.

Sean Martin: Very cool. I'm just picturing, I think it was maybe a year and a half, two years ago, I was writing, [00:08:00] I had a wild hair and was writing some fictional stories. Mm-hmm. And, uh, one of them was about the small town and a baker and a, and a coffee shop and a retail shop. And they were all, one had an issue and it started to spread and they all came together to kind of counteract the mm-hmm. The bad, bad things happening. So as you're telling that story, I'm picturing. One, one entity in in the community gaining that learning and kind of maybe sharing that. Across the rest, rest of the community. Absolutely. Absolutely. And we as a center, we serve about 15,000 individuals every year. And we have a global volunteer base, so more than a thousand active volunteers across 56 countries, um, and growing.

Dhriti P. Stocks: And with the work that we do, we try to do it in coalition, right? So the 50 by 50 initiative is not just us deciding that we're going to somehow magically. Solve the challenge of not enough women in cybersecurity. It's [00:09:00] us saying we together will develop a shared understanding with a range of partners who care about this work. And with that shared understanding, the shared data, a shared understanding of, you know, kind of what are the levers of change, we can all create sustainable change together. Yeah.

Sean Martin: Tell me why 50 by 50? I got a snippet of it at the, uh, the reception the other night, but, mm-hmm.

Dhriti P. Stocks: 50 by 50 is a ways away. It is a ways away. It gives us some time to achieve it. But there's a, there's a purpose. There is a purpose because there's, there's a handful of things happening right now, and they're true everywhere. First of all, the industry's changing a lot. The second thing is we don't know the ways that the industry is gonna change tomorrow, much less. You know, five years from now. And the third thing is when we do these interventions, we can't do these interventions quickly because they will not last. So the way that 50 by 50 is structured is we look at the full spectrum of a individual's career, um, and their career trajectory. We look from K to 12 all the way up to your senior leader in your organization. And we have eight different action areas. So example, career awareness and navigation. At K to 12, that looks like, do you know that cybersecurity is a thing? Do you know that it's not just the hacker in a hoodie, cybersecurity, it is GRC folks and threat intelligence and penetration testing and this the soc. Mm-hmm. You know, all of those sorts of things. And so at K to 12, it's that basic level of understanding education and also I could be good at this. Um, and it's not just this one single stereotype. At an entry level, when you're coming from, you know, kind of bridging the divide between higher education or certification to that first career, what does that look like? That looks totally different. Now students have an understanding, okay, this is cybersecurity. They need an understanding of like, what, how do I exactly navigate this transition? What does career planning look like and intention look like at this? Point in my, in my journey, and so that career awareness and navigation looks completely different at that mid-career level. We know what we want to make sure is that we're building a bench, right? It's not just 50% women, no matter where they are. It's 50% women. Includes 50% women having the ability to speak into the decisions that are made, having the ability to lead, having the ability to advance their careers, and. If you are incredible as a technical performer, individual contributor, there's a totally different set of skills that are needed to persuade leadership, C-Suite, that they need to buy into your ideas. And so how do we create the conditions where they will receive that education and that involvement? And so if we take the long view of 50 by 50, we can build a sustainable path forward and we don't. We don't create this condition where we put a lot of people at the top of the funnel and then, right. You know, we're, we're losing people, it's a leaky bucket, or we're just not capturing the range of possibilities that there are. We know that there are folks right now in cybersecurity that are burning out because it is a stressful career, and so how do we make sure that that burnout rate is not. Overperforming for women that there's not an additional drop off in the number of women that are in security. How do we make sure that we have, again, a shared understanding of the data, the right people around the table, to, to move that data and then a right understanding of what are the levers for change.

Sean Martin: Mm-hmm. And as you're telling that story, I'm, I'm, I think visually I was thinking of what, I dunno if it's the tiller, the one with all the discs and it's wide and, and just paving a nice path that's sustainable and it's gonna grow. And cultivate and recycle and bring in the next generation. Mm-hmm. So, I dunno, that's, I'm weird like that. I love it. Sorry. I love it. What are some of the other, um, other programs they have running? Yeah, so those, the three things. Three main things. Okay. So we work, we provide scholarship. We work with small businesses and small nonprofits, and we lead, and then we 50 by 50. Okay. 50 by 50. And we are intentionally focused on these, these three things because these three things are the most salient for people right now.

Dhriti P. Stocks: Um, we, we, you know, we certainly have educational opportunities. ISC2 members will go out into their community and provide, you know, kind of basic cybersecurity education, those sorts of things. But one of the things I believe is that we really need to focus on the challenges where there's. Not a lot of resource for people and there's a lot of need for people. And right now, you know, if we think of small business for instance, there's the, there's not an understanding that small businesses are a target. They are. There's not an understanding of a resource, what resources are out there, and we are the resource that is out there. Um, and there is, there's a bit of a vacuum when it turn, when, when it comes to this like AI adoption and we're adopting ai, but we don't really understand what it means to be secure. And we're kind of in this messy middle around, you know, how we think about security and, and AI and is everything changing. And so in this messy middle, we have the opportunity to educate and to really bring people along. And so we wanna stay focused on things like that.

Sean Martin: So talk to me about the, the volunteers. Madison hooked me the other night to be a volunteer for the small, medium business stuff. Amazing. Amazing. So I'll, uh, I'll have to figure out what that looks like. Maybe there's some, some company in New York I can, uh, connect with and, and help out. Maybe a couple. I don't know. We'll see. Um, what, what, does it look like for the volunteer?

Dhriti P. Stocks: I'm asking for myself now and everybody else who should be volunteering. Absolutely. Absolutely. So volunteers go through a process where they, you know, decide kind of what they're interested in and what they're excited about, right? So if you're interested in sharing your knowledge and your [00:15:00] insights, then we have avenues for you to contribute on the level of sharing, you know, kind of those practical insights. So for instance, for Global 50x50 Initiative, every maybe four months or so, we assemble an advisory council of leaders who have specific affinity with one of the action areas. Um, so right now we're working with this kind of academic transition, right? So how do you make sure that the people who are transitioning out of higher ed get into job roles and how do we make sure that higher ed and kind of that early hiring situation are having a conversation and a fruitful conversation? And so we went to our volunteer pool from ISC2 and across the community, and we said to all of these experts. How do you think about this and are you equipped to talk to, to talk to us about this? And so we brought them together and they shared their knowledge, which helped inform our research questions, which helped inform what we share out with all of these different organizations that are doing these kinds of interventions so that that way we can figure out again, what's most effective. So that is one mechanism we, we need your brain. The second thing is we need you to use that brain on behalf of some other organization, right? So if you want to, for instance, work with cybersecurity health check, you sign up to volunteer, um, and you sign up to go through kind of a training of, you know, this is the health check we take the the business through. And the reason for that training is when we have, you know, when we have a cyber professional that is really focused on one area and is really, you know, kind of. F uh, deep into their career, we wanna make sure that the bases are covered and the ground is covered. Right. And so we don't want them to be surprised by, uh, an organization that might say to you, what is multifactor authentication? Um, and so we wanna give you the tools to be, you know, conversant with them in, in terms of their specific challenges. Exactly. Exactly. Um, and maybe they're not asking that question other than, does that affect me? Right. Um. But the, so we walk you through this training and then we match you. We, we play matchmaker with a business, um, and we like to do our best to con connect you with a business in your community. That's not always possible, but we do our best to make sure that you're connected with a business in your community. So if you're in New York, there's New York City businesses, and right now. In the United States, we're working specifically in New York City, Maryland, and Plano, Texas. And so those are three key areas where we definitely need a lot of volunteers. Um, and so do you have more businesses and volunteers? Pardon me? Do you have more businesses than volunteers? You know, it depends. It depends. Um, it depends on the region, it depends on the area. One of the things that's important, especially for, again, those small businesses and nonprofits, they don't always know that they need our support. And so the. This is a proactive measure and proactive measures are hard. This is the, you know, the same problem as like the American Red Cross. They say like, okay, you gotta have your jugs of water and you gotta have your first aid kit and you have to have your like, get out if you need to plan and, and do your, you know, do your, like, how do I get out in case of fire? Right? And not everybody does that because that proactive measure, it's very easy to put to the side, I don't have time or it's not gonna affect me or whatever. And then you get into a scenario where you're like, oh no, I have now been affected. What do I do? Right? And the what do I do is a separate question, but the proactive measure for a lot of small businesses, it's even an education to get them to the point where we say, no, actually, like you just need this. This is just basics and it's gonna be not that much of your time to. Really save you some hassle. Potentially save you some hassle. Right. And now I think you probably know the statistics better than I do one attack every three seconds, but I don't, I can't keep up with it. Yeah. So that, as of, as of two days ago, that's what I heard, one attack every three seconds. We'll go with that for now. Yeah. And so, and I, I don't think these ais are getting worse. No. So no, we gotta make sure. Yeah, I was looking at the traffic on my side, like 80% is bots now or something. Oh wow. Used to be roughly half. Hmm. It's crazy. That is crazy. Crazy. Um,

Sean Martin: if a business, I was just thinking going to get a coffee, I should ask them, how are you cyber aware?

Dhriti P. Stocks: And if not, there's a program. I dunno. How, how do businesses and nonprofits ask for assistance? They go to our website, iamcybersafe.org, um, and they can click on the button that says Cybersecurity Health Check. They put in just a little bit of information about themselves. And, uh, we reach out to them and match them up with a professional.

Sean Martin: Very cool. What is, um, let's wrap with a couple stories. Maybe something, uh, somebody was helped shared with you or shared with the center and maybe something from a, from a member who

Dhriti P. Stocks: felt and experienced something that Yeah. That you wanna share. I, so I'm gonna share. About one of our scholarship recipients. Um, so this scholarship recipient, his name is Cujo, um, and he was a, he was a kind, kind of studying to enter the cybersecurity profession. He's from Ghana. Um, and the story he told me is that he, you know, didn't really know what he wanted to do, but he had an, he had an aunt, I believe, who mailed him like a computer and said like, figure out how to get in. Um, and so he cracked it and he was hooked. Um, and so he, he applied to the center for a scholarship. Received a scholarship. Then he, you know, was so, was able to study a little bit and then he applied to the center again for the C-I-S-S-P certification. And so it was able to achieve his certification that way. Um, and so he went from the cybersecurity student to now he is a ciso. And, um, and all of this, I believe before 30. And um, and he's also on the center's board. And one of the things that he always talks about is that, you know, he feels like he has a responsibility to the center, to give back to the center because he benefited so much. And, you know, you can see that trajectory from, like, if he hadn't have been able to have that opportunity, hadn't been given that opportunity, then he wouldn't. Be able to be a CISO now and to be able to contribute to the center and SO'S brought all of that full story around. So cool. And so we know that from our scholarship recipients that not only are we alleviating those barriers for them into accessing the profession, but we're also providing them an avenue to give back and give back in the future. And they all feel that level of care that the center has for them, that ISC2 has for them. Right. I wanna meet him. Yeah. So

Sean Martin: people may forget that there's a.org hanging off the mm-hmm. Off the end of this, uh, brand. Yes. And, uh, this center is that.org piece, right? Mm-hmm. So you run based on charitable giving?

Dhriti P. Stocks: I do. Right. So how, how can people help? I know you're doing because of the 15 year. Mm-hmm. I don't know if you know the code offhand. I dunno the code offhand. I really should. I'll get it with, get it from you later. I'll put it in the notes. Okay, perfect. I think it's a text that you, people can do, donate 15 bucks, but yes. Aside from that, how, how can people help? So we always, individual businesses, we always ask our community for three different things. Okay. We ask them to, first of all, invest. You covered that, right? So if you're an individual, give us. $15 or more in support of our 15th anniversary. Um, if you're a business, we have sponsorships. We have partnerships. This is an opportunity to not only get, make a charitable donation, but also to create the conditions for your workforce to, you know, have the, the. The different perspectives at the table and have the opportunities at the table. And so, you know, they can reach out to us directly center@isc2.org, um, in order to, um, explore a corporate sponsorship, corporate partnership. Um, the second thing I always ask of our community is to engage. So that volunteerism, that's the start, right? So. We want to make sure that individuals have the opportunity to give back. Um, and especially cyber leaders who want to give back in their, you know, on their home turf, in their own communities. Um, and then the third thing we ask of our community is that they advocate for what we believe in together. And so for folks hearing this, um, for you is you're, you know, continuing on this path, um, always just encouraged that, you know, if you're inspired by something that we've talked about, then you share that with somebody else that you've met. Um, so that, that way. Other people understand how important it is that we protect small businesses, how important it is that we make sure that everybody has access to the profession, and how important it is that there's all multiple perspectives in cybersecurity and more women in cybersecurity. So cool.

Sean Martin: Yeah. So cool. And your goal? Invest. Engage and advocate. Best engage. Hey, there's AI in there. Invest. Yeah, something like that. Ah, Dhriti, you're amazing. Thank you. Congrats on, uh, a year in Congrats to the center for 15 years, and congrats on setting a goal for Global 50x50 Initiative. and uh, I'm excited to watch that journey.

Dhriti P. Stocks: I'm, I'm excited to volunteer. Amazing. I'll see how it goes. I'll, I'll report out to the, to my followers how that looks and what the outcome is there. And, uh. Yeah. Good. Good to meet you here at Congress. Yeah, great to meet you as well. Thank you so much. Thanks for the interview. So fun. Thanks everybody. I still have more coming, many conversations here from, uh, ISC2 Security Congress in Denver, so stay tuned.

Sean Martin: ITSPmagazine.com/on [00:25:00] location. See you all.