On this International Women’s Day 2023, we tip our hats and honor some innovative and brilliant women we work with every day of the year.

Many think of careers in cybersecurity as being focused on coding and software development, requiring a deep understanding of how computers and networks connect and collaborate and being fluent in at least one computer language. Many cybersecurity careers require exactly those skills, but some highly technical cyber jobs also require exquisite language and business skills, along with engineering, math, and foolproof research skills.

Today we highlight some of the brilliant women that work for Cybersixgill. And who bring diverse perspectives and a wealth of experience to the team.

Meet Cyber Threat Intelligence Analyst for Cybersixgill, Ilana Toubul. Her background is in providing technical documentation and guidance for military and civilian end users. She is tri-lingual, speaking English, French, and Hebrew. She has honed her ability to take highly complex cybersecurity issues and break that information down into user-friendly, easy-to-digest, actionable documentation. As a seasoned cyber incident response operator, Ilana views herself as a mentor to her clients.

In this brief video, she explains why the simplest thing you can do to protect your online accounts is to create a strong password. And she gives a few other tips and tricks on making it more difficult for hackers to steal your password.

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Delilah Schwartz is the product marketing manager at Cybersixgill, and she’s also a true dark web research powerhouse. Delilah has extensively researched and written about the activity of far-right hate and counter-terrorism groups on the dark web. Her greatest passion is translating “cyber speak” into a more natural language understandable for non-technical readers.

In this short video, Delilah explains the difference between the clear web (news sites, social media), the deep web (bank accounts), and the unindexed and unregulated dark web.

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Cybersecurity research is a global endeavor, and your success stands and falls on the language experts you have access to. Naomi Yusupov is the Chinese threat intelligence analyst at Cybersixgill, and she speaks Mandarin and Russian. While finishing her major in Economics and East Asian Studies, she spent time living in Beijing, where she began her career path in cybersecurity.

Naomi is Cybersixgill’s lead analyst of Russian and Chinese cybercriminal activity. Her research was the backbone for The Bear and the Dragon - an in-depth report analyzing the Chinese and Russian dark web cybercriminal communities, which was co-authored with Cybersixgill’s Delilah Schwartz.

Naomi discovered that the situation on the dark web closely mimicked geopolitical relations as they played out offline, especially when framed in the context of the Ukrainian conflict.

Some dark web communities splintered because threat actors chose sides in the Ukrainian invasion. Some underground forums banned Russian threat actors who began seeking coalitions with Chinese cybercriminals.

Though Russian and Chinese threat actors often have different motivations, with Russians being motivated by money and the Chinese being motivated by patriotism, they began working together as their respective home countries formed a geopolitical alliance.  

In this Dr. Dark Web episode hosted by Chris Roberts, Naomi, and Delilah Schwartz discuss their research and how they worked together on this fascinating paper.

We hope you will join us as we celebrate these and all the other inspiring women working in STEM and cybersecurity. Happy International Women’s Day!