June 15, 2019

Keya Horiuchi - From Teacher, Filmmaker, and Website Design to Security Engineer!

Keya was a public school teacher who stood out from the crowd. She loves problem-solving and challenging environments. Keya was also a filmmaker and web designer. She's currently a detection security engineer who gets knee-deep in malware on a daily basis.

Keya was a public school teacher who stood out from the crowd. She loves problem-solving and challenging environments. Keya was also a filmmaker and web designer. She's currently a detection security engineer who gets knee-deep in malware on a daily basis.

Notes:

  • Knew she didn't want to be a teacher her whole life
  • Was the only one in the rational thinking group at her school
  • Enjoys rational thinking and the problem-solving process
  • Prototyped a mock medical device with a Raspberry Pi and won a national competition!

Quotes:

  • "Easy to get into what you're comfortable with... and I didn't want to have a job like that."
  • "It was something that I enjoyed, but I definitely feel more at home with the cohort that I work with currently and with what I do."
  • "For me, it was an amazing process because I hadn't ever SSH’d into a device and I had to figure out how to get like ports scan."
  • "I read so much documentation on all the little things that we connected to it. I watched a bunch of YouTube videos. I looked at a lot of GitHub accounts trying to figure out like I've got to make this move." [14:24]
  • "It was incredibly challenging. A lot of times I was trying to figure [things] out... sometimes the information that you get from the client is essentially just a hint of what's going on in the network." [17:07]
  • " You just have to be creative and keep going at it until you can do what needs to be done." [18:08]
  • "Yeah, it's amazing. Especially coming from public school teaching, where I had seen almost physical fights altercations happen over, like, reams of paper because there's just not that much allocated towards schools to where snacks are brought in. Like, it's a very different environment…" [21:22]
  • "You did great on the test, but I want to watch you take the test." [23:06]

Links:

Getting Into Infosec:

Follow Ayman on Twitter

Breaking IN: A Practical Guide to Starting a Career in Information Security