San Antonio-based email-focused software company Pathwire hired technology veteran Jesse Kinser as its chief information security officer in July, as reported by the Business Journal. Kinser is considered one of the top hackers in the world. She was invited by the Marines in 2018 to a "bug bounty" event, during which hackers were paid cash every time they exposed a security gap in the Marines' public websites. The Business Journal talked with Kinser about how cybersecurity and hacking have played such an important role in her career.
Tell me a little bit about your professional background and how you got involved in cybersecurity? I got my undergraduate degree in informatics and I got really interested in security while I was in college. I started doing a lot of independent research on things like digital forensics and mobile hacking and even found a way to actually introduce malicious apps into the Android app store at the time.
It was all ad hoc and just a passion of mine. At the time, there wasn't a formal program, so I just did this research on my own throughout my undergraduate career.
That's how I ended up working for the Department of Defense for a couple years doing information security type tasks on a national level. While I was there, I got my master's degree in computer science. It was a good opportunity for me to see how cybersecurity works at a national level right out of college.
After a five-year mark of government work, I decided to move over to private industry and moved back to my home state of Indiana, taking a job with an energy company, modernizing their tech stack as well and getting them interested in cloud building mobile apps.
Then I jumped over to startup life, and joined a small local startup where I was the director of infrastructure and security where I worked on getting them fully [Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act] compliant, and did a lot of penetration testing on their infrastructure. I would spend time during the day breaking into these systems and then helping the engineers fix these bugs.
Then I jumped over to Salesforce, and spent time on their product security team and that's where I got started in the bug bounty community.
How has the bug bounty community impacted your career? That's when security started to become a lifestyle for me. I was doing my day job, which was security, and then on nights and weekends I started hacking to get all of these other companies and engaging with them. I started traveling around to live hacking competitions, where companies would invite a group of top hackers out and spend two or three days hacking against the binaries.
I continue to do that. Bug bounty has been a big part of my career and it's really put me where I'm at today, because I can keep my technical skills really sharp. Then I get to focus on the business side of things over in my day job. It keeps me connected.
What are some of the goals you'd like to complete in your first year as the CISO for Pathwire? A big thing for me is I want to take modern security concepts and bring all of the Pathwire products into a central location and wrapped around modern architecture style.
How does it feel to be a woman in an executive position in a very male-dominated field? When I see another woman in this position, it's just reassurance to me that anybody can do this job if they want to. There should be no barriers to getting in and really going after a technical role, whether it be in security or development or whatever it may be. It's a mindset thing.
Don't get me wrong, there's definitely external challenges, as well, but I think the first step is your own personal mindset and breaking past that internal barrier. Make the small steps, small stepping stones to get to that larger goal and don't give up along the way.
