Huntress Career Growth & Development

Describe your career journey so far. What skills and experiences have you acquired along the way that have helped you get to where you are now?

I had originally started out as a musician, but had always been good with computers. I had taken some programming classes in junior high and had just puttered around with them for fun. When I moved to NYC I eventually decided to study computer science more formally. Eventually I decided to meld my love of true crime and computers and got a master’s degree in computer forensics. Learning how to program was integral to my success, however, since the field of computer forensics was still very new and you would often have to create new tools to parse artifacts (because there wasn’t a tool available) or troubleshoot existing tools that might not work as expected. Also having knowledge of how to program and operating systems internals made my analysis skills better because I knew how programs should operate and how to debug them. This was extremely helpful when trying to reverse engineer malware or writing new code to do RAM forensics.

What support did you receive from individuals or resources that helped you step into a leadership role?

When I was a grad student I was lucky to have stumbled across some research around memory (RAM) forensics, (which led to the Volatility project) and I was able to find one of the authors (Aaron Walters) on IRC (an online chatroom). I was interested in this project because it was a component that I needed in order to finish a research project of my own. Luckily Aaron and others in the chatroom were very receptive and encouraging. It was a wonderful open source community in which I was accepted and flourished. As I got more involved in the project, I took on more and more responsibilities. I had really found my niche.

Being one of the people responsible for updating and maintaining code for the Volatility project definitely helped put me on the trajectory for a leadership role. When working with others on open sourced projects, you can come across all kinds of personality types. There will be times you don’t agree on things, but you have to come to some sort of common ground in order for the project to survive. I was able to take what I learned during there and apply it to my day job in order to manage not only time and projects, but people.

How do you encourage other women on your team to become leaders themselves? Are there any stories you can share that showcase how you’ve done this?

These days I tend to act as a sounding board and mentor for various women co-workers, friends or acquaintances as requested. I try to listen as much as I can when others come for advice. Women in general are not often listened to in their day-to-day lives, often due to bias, so I try to make sure that they feel heard when they are seeking advice on something. It also doesn’t make sense to try to solve a problem for someone, without even fully understanding the problem to begin with. I try to ask open-ended questions so that I’m not probing them towards an answer that I am thinking of before knowing the full scope of the problem.

Recently I had someone who was trying to advance her career, but didn’t feel like people were taking her seriously. The main problem I saw was that upper leadership just didn’t know much about her at all. I gave her advice on how to make herself more visible, but within her comfort zone. She took the advice and it worked- she was promoted within the next promotion cycle. Sometimes it’s not that you’re doing the wrong things, you may just need to tweak what you do, in order to accomplish your goals. Talking to a third party person might help with that.