At a January 26 conference hosted by Women Leaders in Cybersecurity, law firm partners, government officials, corporate leaders, and other experts in law and tech convened to discuss new cybersecurity regulations and artificial intelligence’s impact on business and law.
Judith Germano, founder and lead counsel of Germano Law LLC, who started the discussion series Women Leaders in Cybersecurity at NYU in 2016, delivered opening remarks. “For nine years, we’ve been bringing together amazing people, women experts in cybersecurity,” she said. “The way that it started was sitting through a lot of conferences with all men on the panel. People would say to me, ‘I’m sorry, but there just aren’t any women in cybersecurity.’ And I said, ‘Of course there are. You just need to look a little harder.’”
The day-long event featured three panel discussions and a fireside chat with Linnie Haynesworth, corporate board member and former aerospace and defense executive at Northrop Grumman. Among the subjects covered were best practices in leveraging artificial intelligence, career development in cybersecurity, and new cybersecurity regulations from the US Securities and Exchange Commission and the New York Department of Financial Services.
Panelist JoAnn Stonier, fellow of data and AI at MasterCard, emphasized the importance of advancing understanding of new tech’s capabilities. Innovators “have created these incredible generative thinking models from publicly available data,” Stonier said. “…And the challenge is that the rest of us who are now using or consuming those models have very little transparency into how that is being done—and that’s where regulators are getting concerned… If we ask the prompt today—versus yesterday, or three weeks from now—we get different answers because the data is changing, the intelligence is changing, the globe is changing. And so understanding the data, what we’re asking, and the models, become increasingly important…. While we can rely on the machines for a certain amount, we have to rely on all of us to really interrogate those results.”
Watch the panel discussions and fireside chat on video:
Opening Remarks:
- Judith Germano, founder of Women Leaders in Cybersecurity, founder and lead counsel of Germano Law LLC
Panel 1: Cyber Regulations: the New SEC and NYDFS Rules
- Melissa Hathaway, president of Hathaway Global Strategies LLC
- Harriet Pearson, executive deputy superintendent and cybersecurity division head, New York Department of Financial Services
- Alicia Lowery Rosenbaum, vice president and associate general counsel, Cybersecurity Technology and Trust
Fireside Chat with Linnie Haynesworth, corporate board member, federal advisory appointee, Department of Defense Defense Business Board
Panel 2: AI’s Impact: Opportunity and Risk:
- Jennifer Kady, vice president, security sales and Americas general manager, IBM
- Maneesha Mithal, privacy and cybersecurity partner, Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati
- JoAnn Stonier, fellow of data & AI, Mastercard
- Lucy Vasserman, head of engineering and product, Jigsaw/Google
- Micaela McMurrough, partner, Covington & Burling, LLP
Panel 3: Evolving Your Career: Building Your Personal Brand
- Linda Lautenberg, co-founder of EvolveMe
- Kavitha Mariappan, executive vice president of customer experience and transformation, Zscaler
- Andrea Markstrom, CIO of Schulte Roth & Zabel, founder of iWill
- Harriet Pearson
- Alicia Lowery Rosenbaum
- Kathryn Lancioni, professor at Rutgers University and founder of Presenting Perfection
Posted March 13, 2024