Alex Ryan: From zero chill to quiet confidence
Summary: Alex Ryan, an Incident Commander at Cisco Talos Incident Response, describes her path from two liberal arts degrees into incident response, vulnerability management and risk management, joining Talos because she had long used its finished intelligence to guide her own response work. She describes the role as high-pressure work that requires exuding quiet confidence to customers while managing chaotic back-end forensics, and cites a statistic that about 70% of small to medium businesses that paid a ransom went out of business within a year.
Why it matters: Ryan says incident response has a very high burnout rate and that it took her about two years to detox from the work after returning from raising her children - a concrete measure of what the job costs the people you rely on during your worst day.
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- Topics
- Detection & Response
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