At SuperAwesome, we’re committed to ensuring team members grow and up-skill within their team, and the company as a whole. In this Women in Tech series, we’ll be looking at the career paths of various women working in tech within SuperAwesome – from engineers to product managers to everything in between.
Kiah started out her cyber security career at university where she was a researcher for the university’s Strategy and Security Institute. After graduating she became a cyber security consultant, working with a range of clients from multinational corporations to high-profile individuals. In 2019 she decided to move to an in-house role, and joined SuperAwesome as their Head of InfoSec.
What does your role involve?
My role involves keeping SuperAwesome safe from cyber threats.
Security is a tough subject, and people often assume my job must be super technical and focused on just stopping ‘the baddies’ getting in. However, it’s not that simple. There will always be someone who can break your defences, or who will find a way in through a third party relationship or supplier.
This is why we focus on ‘defence in depth’, which means creating a layered defence covering multiple security domains. A big part of that which people often forget is focusing on user awareness; people are known to be the weakest link in security, and part of my job is to ensure our staff are able to do their jobs securely and spot potential threats when they occur.
What’s your favourite thing about your job?
It may sound cliche, but every day on this job is different. From delivering cyber awareness training, to working with IT to manage our users and devices, to reviewing our application security. My job is so varied, and it involves working with all the teams at SuperAwesome to improve our security.
I also think it’s important to work with people who aren’t always ‘security minded’; at my previous jobs security has been our product, so it can be easy to forget how obscure and challenging this topic is for most people. One of my favourite challenges is taking a security topic and turning it into something meaningful for a non-technical/non-security focused audience, as it really forces you to step back and look at why people should care about security. Fancy new solutions don’t matter if people are still making basic mistakes or finding ways to circumvent controls, so it’s really important to focus on building a culture of security across your organisation.
What makes you proud to work in kidtech?
I was basically raised on the internet, so I know how important it is to make sure children are protected online. The internet can be a great place for exploration and creativity, but kids are too young to be making informed decisions about their data and the content they’re exposed to. As such, I’m proud to be part of a team that helps deal with these issues on their behalf.
What excites you about kidtech?
Kidtech is such an emerging industry; people are beginning to realise just how much kids use and rely on the internet, and how little there is in the way of protections for them. The introduction of more stringent regulations like GDPR couldn’t have come sooner as it really pushes companies to think twice about the legality (and, I believe, the morals) of how they’re handling their child users. We’re seeing a cultural shift in how we view our personal data, and I’m excited that protecting kids is at the forefront of this movement.
Interested in contributing to SuperAwesome’s mission to make the Internet safer for kids? Check out our job openings here.
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