CyberWire Daily - Teresa Shea: The challenge of adapting new technologies. [Intelligence] [Career Notes]

Episode Date: November 17, 2024

Please enjoy this encore episode where Vice President of Raytheon's Cyber Offense, Defense Expert Teresa Shea speaks of her journey from math to adapting new technologies on the cutting edge, With a love of math, Teresa was offered a scholarship by the Society of Women Engineering and decided to pursue a degree in electrical engineering. Unsurprisingly, there were few other women in her program, Teresa interned with and then proceeded to work for the National Security Agency becoming their SIGINT director. Following her government career, Teresa worked to help bring new technologies to government through her work at Raytheon. We thank Teresa for sharing her story with us. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're listening to the Cyber Wire Network, powered by N2K. of you, I was concerned about my data being sold by data brokers. So I decided to try Delete.me. I have to say, Delete.me is a game changer. Within days of signing up, they started removing my personal information from hundreds of data brokers. I finally have peace of mind knowing my data privacy is protected. Delete.me's team does all the work for you with detailed reports so you know exactly what's been done. Take control of your data and keep your private life Thank you. JoinDeleteMe.com slash N2K and use promo code N2K at checkout. The only way to get 20% off is to go to JoinDeleteMe.com slash N2K and enter code N2K at checkout. That's JoinDeleteMe.com slash N2K, code N2K. My name is Teresa Shea, and I am a vice president at Raytheon, running a group called Cyber Offense Defense Experts.

When I was a little girl, I knew that I wanted to be a teacher. We played school all the time. That's what we did. And as I got older, I zeroed in on becoming a math teacher. So I graduated from high school in 1977, which was just about the time ARPANET was turning into the Internet. I really liked math. It was almost an escape for me. And I knew in high school that it wasn't really a common thing, especially for girls to like. What got my attention was when I graduated from high school, the Society of Women Engineering, you've heard of them, I'm sure, they gave me a scholarship.

And I was like, wow, this is pretty cool. I need to check out this engineering thing. As I recall, even back then, W was hard. It was a hard field. There weren't a lot of women. In fact, probably one other woman in most of my classes. And what ended up happening here is while I was in college, I looked into internships and summer work.

And I ended up doing an internship with the National Security Agency up at Fort Meade. And that was a highlight. I mean, a real, real highlight of my experience. I got exposed to the mission there and I got exposed to the people there and it was just awesome. So they were very focused on electrical engineering. So it really drove me to finish there and my goal was to go work for them. I was the singing director there in 2013 when the whole Snowden affair happened and I knew that we were going to have to recover from that quickly and that we were going to have to adapt new technologies faster than we were able to build them ourselves.

And so I got exposed to a strategic investor for the intelligence community called In-Q-Tel. So when I retired in 2015, the next year I went to work for In-Q-Tel to run a cybersecurity lab there to work on leveraging those startup technologies. And after about three years there, it was clear to me that it was really hard to get startup technology into the intelligence community operational side, largely because the startups don't, you know, they're not all U.S. persons. Sometimes they don't all have U.S. investments. They certainly don't have security clearances and they typically aren't interested in getting security clearances or dealing with the acquisition processes that, you know, our government and especially intelligence community have for good reason. So I wanted to go with a system integrator that believed in

partnering and leveraging some of those advanced technologies. And I knew about this group in Raytheon called Cyber Offense Defense Experts. I knew about them from being in the intelligence community and I knew they had the best people and worked on the cutting edge capabilities. So that and the leadership there at Raytheon that I wanted to work for, because who you work for is so important, is why I chose to go to Raytheon.

Great, Leon. There's a lot of discussion about success, right? How do you define success? But really what matters to me is not so much any success that you might think I had, but what matters to me is really about the significance in people's lives. If I can every day encourage people and help them along in their journey, especially if they're in this space with me, then that's how I want to be remembered. I do believe that, you know, every act of encouragement or empowerment really matters. And we need to be doing that for each other. And we need to do it with integrity and compassion

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