10-24-2021 Women to Watch - Flipbook - Page 6
Q&A with
Rachel
Wilson
A discussion with the
cybersecurity expert and
Morgan Stanley executive
By Christine Condon
COURTESY PHOTO
W
hen Rachel Wilson began her
career in cybersecurity at the
National Security Agency in the
months after 9/11, she never
imagined she’d one day work for Morgan Stanley Wealth Management.
Her time at the NSA took her from the
American embassy in London, where she
countered terrorist threats to the 2012 Olympic
Games, to Maryland’s Fort Meade, where she
addressed terrorist threats to the U.S.
By 2017, when she became Morgan Stanley’s
head of wealth management data security &
infrastructure risk, Wilson says she was ready
for a change of pace. Wilson is set to discuss
all this and more as keynote speaker for The
Baltimore Sun’s Women to Watch networking
event Oct. 28.
How have cyber threats evolved during the
COVID-19 pandemic?
I’ve never seen anything like what is truly
a cyber crime pandemic these past 18 months
— on top of everything else, in the 20 years I’ve
been in this business.
We’ve seen a huge volume of phishing
emails that are offering advice on preventing
COVID-19 infections, or sometimes these websites are trying to sell fake items. Back before
the vaccine, we would see treatments and
oxygen purifiers and all kinds of things being
sold on these fraudulent websites, but it really
is the hackers trying to take advantage of our
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depleted mental state over the pandemic, and
they’re also really working to take advantage of
the fact that so many people are working from
home.
What must companies do to defend against
these threats?
Whether you’re a large business, mediumsized, small, individual, it’s keeping all of your
devices, all of your operating systems — so this
would be your phone, your laptop, the apps on
your phone, your browser — keeping them all
fully patched and up to date.
I think it’s really important for everyone —
people, as well as companies — to store their
critical data in multiple places.
It’s also important for people and companies to actually practice restoring from those
backups. What [my team] sees happen far
too often is that an individual or a company
thinks that they have their data backed up, but
they’ve never practiced the process of restoring
and so when push comes to shove, they actually
find it to be much more difficult or even impossible — even when they think they’ve done all
the right things.
What is your advice for women in maledominated fields like cybersecurity?
The advice that I’ve always given my mentees, who find themselves in these situations
where they’re the only woman in the room is
that I want them to come well-prepared to the
meeting with three crisp, pithy things that they
might want to say.
But I insist that they say something within
the first 10 minutes, because the mistake I
frequently see women make is that they’re
well prepared, they have great ideas, they know
the opinion and the leverage that they want
to have, but then they let the meeting slip
through their fingers.
What tools have you used to achieve a
meaningful work-life balance?
I don’t do a good job with work-life balance.
I think it’s really, really hard. It’s ever-tempting
to check that email, to make that phone call, to
work on a Saturday or Sunday. So, the approach
that I’veused is not to try to achieve balance
per se, but simply to be very, very present
wherever I am. So when I’m at work, I am at
work.
Likewise, when I’m at home, It’s putting
my phone down and saying ‘OK, I’m at home
now and I’m in a separate place and I’m in my
wife-and-mother-and-daughter-and-sister role.’
So, I’m not going to send that next text. I’m not
going to send that next work email. Instead, I’m
going to be fully present.
That is why work-from-home for me last
year was so terrible, because it made it virtually impossible for me to use my strategy of
being fully present where I was, and I was
trying to do work when there was the constant
temptation to multitask.