Without any further ado, I want to welcome you to the Norwich University inaugural leadership conference and Todd Lecture Series keynote address, The Road Less Travel. We're thrilled to have Marine here, Vice President, Chief Information Security Officer of Johnson & Johnson, recently retired here with us this evening. And Ms. Allison is an accomplished executive and leader who's applied her talents in both the military and corporate sectors. She is also a trailblazer having been part of the first female cohort to graduate from the United States Military Academy at West Point. After graduating from West Point, Ms. Allison served in the U.S. Army where she held several leadership positions. Her military service taught her many valuable lessons about leadership, teamwork, and resilience that have served her well throughout her career. After leaving the military, but before joining the corporate world, she served as a special agent in the FBI working on undercover drug operations in Newark, New Jersey. Wonderful place to visit. And also working on terrorist bombings in San Diego, California. She developed and participated in the nuclear terrorism exercise Compass Rose in 1988, the largest mock terrorism incident exercised by the federal government. Ms. Allison's most recent corporate post has been the CISO for Johnson & Johnson with the primary responsibility for protecting their information technology systems and business data worldwide. This includes ensuring that the company's information security posture supports business growth objectives, protects public trust in Johnson & Johnson brand, and meets legal and regulatory requirements. I met Ms. Allison during the COVID crisis and remarkable job bringing Johnson & Johnson through that era. But prior to joining J&J, Marine was Chief Security Officer and VP of MedCo, the largest pharmacy benefit manager in the U.S. Marine was responsible for all aspects of the company's security, regulatory compliance, including physical and logistic security, executive protection, as well as HIPAA, payment card industry, Medicare, and prescription frauds and IT controls. In short, Ms. Allison is widely recognized as an expert in the field of cybersecurity and risk management. She had been featured in numerous publications including the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and Fortune, and has been a guest on several national news programs. As a keynote speaker at today's leadership conference, Marine Allison will share her insights and experiences on leadership, cybersecurity, and risk management. She will draw upon her experiences in both the military and private sector to provide valuable advice and inspiration to all of us who are striving to become better leaders. Please join me in giving a warm welcome to Marine Allison, our TARD lecture series keynote speaker. Can I have to be my timer? Can I have to be my timer? Okay. Hey, everyone. It's wonderful to be here. First of all, it was actually warmer in Burlington when I landed at 67 degrees than it was when I left Jacksonville, Florida, this morning at 9.30 in the morning. So, on you guys for actually having better weather in Vermont because I was fearful for the entire trip, oh my God, what if they have a snowstorm? And it's real, you know. April is a good time for snowstorms in Vermont. Like last week it was 20 degrees. I was looking at the weather and I'm like, okay, I don't have those clothes anymore. I have completely transformed. I met General Gaines at Embry Riddle a couple of years ago. We were both bored out of our tears. You know, what the heck are we doing sitting here and she was down the road a couple of hours, so I got my son and we got in the car and we drove down there. Now, my son is, he works at J&J also and he's an IT, works in our supply chain for our contact lenses on programming and running the technology that ships those contacts worldwide. But where he wanted to go to school in the beginning was Embry Riddle. And so we thought it would be a great road trip, especially in the middle of a pandemic. We're in Florida. We didn't really know about COVID, okay? Cause we had a completely different experience down there than the Wenglin did. Went down there and we just, Karen and I hit it off. We just started chit-chatting about this thing, that thing and the other thing. And what it told me is is even in the middle of a pandemic you can find new friends. And that's what we did is we became very fast friends. Now, Norwich University, everybody's told me how wonderful it is today. I want you to know I already know that. I love this school, okay? It is one of the most amazing schools in my mind. You know why? I love cyber talent. You are one of the very first universities to have a cyber master's degree program. Information assurance. You're awesome. You also have a core cadets. That's awesome. I could not be any prouder to actually have been asked to come here. The other thing that why I love Norwich and I love Vermont so much, it's where I used to summer when I was a little girl. So when I got off of 89 and to go into Montpelier, and it said St. John's Berry, it brought back a very warm feeling to my heart. It's where I saw my first stuffed moose. And to this day, I haven't seen a real moose, okay? There's signs everywhere on the highways here, but I have not seen that real moose. I am sure one day I will. Hopefully, I'll be in Vermont. And I used to go up to Willoughby Lake and in the Northeast Kingdom and absolutely loved it. So when I was in high school and I was on speech and debate, one of the poets that I most was enthralled with and I loved his poems was Robert Frost. And on my saber when I graduated from West Point, and I gave to my parents that now sits in my office, it says two roads diverged in the woods and I took the one less traveled and it made all the difference. And I didn't put the slide up. The slide deck was originally created in about 2016. And so I've been using that since then. So the spirit of Vermont has been with me for all these years. So thank you for that. All right, now here's the, will it work? Plan B, let's see. So that's me, Phil Talkie. We were talking today at dinner about Phil Talkie. And I played Phil Talkie, it was a state championship team. Being a top level athlete in what you need to give to a team became a very, very important fundamental core value that I had is that it's not about just me. It's not about, well, I was a defender, so I was never gonna score unless I scored on myself and thank God I never did that. But it was making sure that we were defended. We won our state championship because little known facts in Phil Talkie in the defensive zone, if you're at a tied game, it's who's less time in one side of the goal becomes how you win the game. That's how we won the championship. So for all my defenders out there, hey, here's on you. I was class president. I won by two votes. I was in the race and I won by two votes. Doesn't matter. I won, I was a class president. The other guy laughed and went to a private school because he was so ashamed of being a woman becoming the class president. Eventually inducted into the Hall of Fame, which was pretty amazing. Every other woman on that team actually played on a D1 school for Phil Talkie. Now, the story here is the very first school that I really was interested in going to was Wellesley. All female school just outside of Boston. That was my number one school. When I realized that wasn't going to happen, my number two school was I would go to the Air Force Academy because they just opened. November 1975, they opened up the military academies for admissions for women. And my dad said, hey, Marine, you could go to the Air Force Academy. So I applied to go to the Air Force Academy. The second, what I didn't know was I also received, well, I didn't know it. I received a four year ROTC scholarship to MIT. What no one ever told me was I could go to MIT for free and I would be accepted. No one ever told me that. ROTC people didn't tell me. They just gave me the scholarship. And I did not know what to do with it. There was only one person in my life or my very first sponsor in my life at that time was the congresswoman that I applied to go to the Air Force Academy with. She decided she didn't want me to go to the Air Force Academy. She gave me her principal nomination to West Point. So Site Unseen didn't know what the MIT thing was about. You know, you talk about being 17 and not knowing what's going on in life. Okay, so I go, I don't know what this MIT thing, I'm not getting into Wellesley. I'm not getting the Air Force Academy. Margaret Heckler gives me this principal nomination on July 7th, 1976. Site Unseen, I show up at West Point, had never been on the campus, never had talked to any instructor and I showed up and went to West Point. Kind of crazy, but you can do it, you can do it. I showed up with 119 women and there were 4,400 men at West Point and 4,399 of them didn't want us there. They did not want us there. We were changing history. There are academic halls at West Point that still have latrines in the women's bathrooms. 45 years later. They took the tails on the full dress coat. There was a woman who had a full dress coat on and the tails with the buttons in the back.  They cut the tails off of those full dress jackets that they issued to the women, which told me they never intended us to graduate because where did the first stand in formation?  But that's, there was no concept that we would make it all the way through. What has been found out over those years, oh, and the other story was we were allowed to wear skirts in formation. You're allowed to wear skirts in formation, right? Here, right, you wear skirts. I was pulled off the mess hall steps by my skirt as a plebe and yelled at that I wasn't allowed to wear the skirt in formation. And because of that, that resolve, I decided at that point in time that I would no longer allow people to be told that they couldn't do something that they were allowed to do. And I was gonna make it better. And my voice was no longer gonna be quiet. Now I decided that I didn't take any action on that till after I graduated, okay? Because I did wanna graduate. It was constant competition against men. But I found a sport, oh yeah, the field hockey thing. This is what you should know. So the recruiter, somebody did talk to me and they did say, you know, Marine, we're gonna have field hockey at West Point. So you'll be great here. I'm like, okay, 43 years later, there's still no field hockey at West Point, okay? I'm still waiting. So I had to find another sport, but I got the thinking sport. So I became an orienteer. There are a few things that women have to do well in the military to even be seen as successful. You have to be able to run. You have to be able to run. And you have to think while you're running.  But one of the things I found out was I was really good at orienteering. So good at orienteering, not only a part of our training, my roommate and I did a marathon together, but we made the U.S. orienteering team and were able to go to St. Gallin, Switzerland. And in 1980, the U.S. boycotted the Olympics. And we're one of very few people who actually got to compete on the international stage at this orienteering championship and represent the United States. And it was absolutely amazing how much fun it was. Now, a couple, two weeks from now, I'm having 25 of my female classmates at my house. I'm setting up an orienteering course. We have a 219 acre farm. And so we plan to have some fun. So after I graduated, I got to go to St. Gallin, Switzerland and orienteer. Then I went to Fort McClellan, Alabama, where I met my husband and married 42 years. And we were both military police officers. Now, I had an electrical engineering degree from West Point. You get to choose your branch at West Point by your class rank. Well, shoes are chosen. One will have to debate what those are. So I got voluntold. And at the time, we didn't know, they weren't sure about women in ADA or FA. And there were no women in infantry or armor, none. And so I got the very last slot in military police. And because I got that slot, I met my husband, who knows, I may have met him otherwise. But I met him there. It was a long, hot summer at Fort McClellan, Alabama. So anybody who's been there knows what I'm talking about. And from there, I went to Fort Hood, Texas and I went to aerosol school. At aerosol school, after I got through with aerosol school, I found out that I actually was pregnant with my son when I went to aerosol school. And he's always been demanding that he should have aerosol wings because he also went through. But I tell him, hey, he's a helicopter pilot. I should have helicopter wings. And so we end with that. I went to Fort Chaffee, Arkansas when they brought in the Cuban Mario Litos that were let out of Castro's prison and learned very early about civil disruption, civil disobedience. There were riots there while we were there and learning how to deal with that situation became extremely important. So also when I started realizing government policy can impact and I can make a difference. How can I make a difference in this world by managing some of these situations? So what did I do? Well, actually it was Donald Rumsfeld decided that he didn't want women to get shot at. He didn't want women's in harm's way. We were in the military but he didn't want us in harm's way. We're probably what, 3%, 4% of the force at that point in time. So I got out of the army where half the time you didn't have bullets in your gun anyway. And I went to the FBI and I wore a gun with bullets every single day. And part of what I did was in San Diego this, I did background check. Oh, I guess that's not Rumsfeld, that's the Supreme Court judge that we did his background check. And then we had Captain Rogers bombing. Anybody know what the Captain Rogers bombing was? Any of my history majors? Captain Rogers was the captain of the Vincennes. It was an arduous cruiser in the Gulf and he in late 1980s said that an Iranian airbus, a civilian airbus was attacking his ship and he shot it down. If we had looked at history over the years, we would have been looking for terrorists using airplanes as a bomb, as a weapon. And that is part of what we saw later in New York City with the World Trade Center was the use of those aircraft. And from there, my husband and I decided we didn't like it. Hey, California was too cool for us. So we moved to the East Coast and they put us in New York, New Jersey. And I did undercover drug operations. And as part of that, being able to talk to people. So everyone always wanted to know how did you, Marine, how did you get these great drug informants? I tapped in to a group that was bringing in over 10,000 kilos of cocaine into the New York metro region every single month. It was by talking to people and listening to what they have to say. And reaching to them at their situation and understanding. Not judging, not criticizing, but talking to them. And what I found out is the more people I talked to, the more people they came to me and I ended up getting some really great informants. Now, one of the coolest things that I did was we knew that 10,000 kilos of cocaine, no, 1,000 kilos, excuse me, were coming into the Port of Houston. And no drug dealer does anything on Monday through Friday. They do it on the weekends because they know all the FBI agents and cops aren't working on the weekends. And so my informant told me that they were coming in Port of Houston. And he was going down there and he was supposed to pick up the load. So he picked up the load and I worked with the Houston FBI who when I flew down there to talk to them on Labor Day weekend, thought I was out of my mind and wouldn't hear me. Wouldn't listen to me. That in fact, we have tapped into this network and they didn't want to do it.  He had all sorts of bruises and scabs on his back from what they did to him. I convinced the Harris County in Houston to let me take him and I put him in a tractor trailer and myself and a cooperating witness and we drove that tractor trailer back across the United States through Atlanta. And then Atlanta, hey, this was before ATMs. So like, guess what? Somewhere I ran out of money, didn't have gas money. And so the FBI office had to meet me at some sleazy motel outside of Atlanta with cash so that I could actually buy food and buy gas to drive the tractor trailer back to New Jersey. And I've got like a tunic top on. I got my gun leather underneath. I got my gun underneath my tunic and we're at a gas station and I'm filling up, because we also had a chase car. The car that I was in was a Lincoln Continental with Georgia plates and the tractor trailer had Florida plates on the cab and main plates on the tractor or on the trailer. We were like, drug deal, drug deal, drug deal. I got, we got stuck a lot. And so we drove this sucker back up and we decided I got into Maryland and we're waiting for the FBI office up in Newark to coordinate the take down activities because what we wanted to do was we were gonna take this load and we were gonna pretend to give it to the bad guys so we could get to the next group that would get us in into the larger group so we could figure out who was getting the 10,000 kilos. So sitting there in a parking lot in Maryland. Anybody been through Maryland, right? Maryland State Troopers, right? Like you look sideways, like they're stopping you, right? So the Maryland State, on that super fresh parking lot in Maryland and State Trooper comes over and he's like, hey, what's going on? And I go, hey, I'm an FBI agent and show him a badge. And I go, you're not gonna really believe me. It's okay, I get this. Go like in Continental with Georgia Plays, I got this, that and the other thing. I said, I need you to call the Newark FBI office, who they called, who then told them, let the real story. He comes back and he goes, I just want you to know. I wish you good luck and you're right. I didn't believe you. And so here we were, this traveling drug deal.  His life was in my hands. And to be able to get someone to trust you in that manner and then to be able to ensure that their safety is taken care of. We did the deal on the New Jersey Turnpike like 10 p.m. that night after I'd been there for 10 hours, 12 hours, and we were able to take it down. But two things from this, is that trust of that individual and we were able to get him relocated so he didn't get killed afterwards. And I handed him off to another FBI agent who's been in Florida and took care of him for a long time. And the other thing is, does this face look like a drug dealer? It is not. So don't take an expectation or say, hey, I can't do that because I don't know it or I don't look like it or I'm not tall enough or I'm not short enough or I'm not fat enough or I'm not thin enough. What I learned on the cold New Jersey Turnpike is that you just have to do the thing and understand and learn. There's a series of tasks and just because you don't look like it and just because it's not convention, you can do whatever you want. If you just learn and treat people very, very well. It's a long way back to, you know, but I'll get there. So after I had worked in the FBI, and so you see a pattern here. I went to the United States Military Academy at West Point, it was all men. Then listen, still graduated. Then I went in the FBI still in this convention of what you can do and can't do. I ran in what ended up being my second sponsor. My first one was Margaret Hackler and my second was Lieutenant General Sam Wexel. His West Point graduate, he was on the board of directors of A&P Foods and he was there with two women. One of the very first board of directors in the United States that had women on it. One was the major stockholder's wife and the other was her best friend. Well, overwine one night, they were talking about who the new head of security should be. They were looking for somebody in law enforcement, somebody who was a woman, and oh yeah, we better find somebody who's a West Point graduate. And it'd be great if they lived in New Jersey. One person fit that bill, that was me. When I went in for the interviews, here I am an FBI agent. I know nothing about corporate security. Zero, nada, nothing. And I went in and I was, okay, we'll just see how this works. My time, let me go in. It ended up, we talked about leadership. We talked about developing a team. We talked about how to learn in the security area. And so what I did, obviously I passed the interview and I became their head of security. And what I learned there was, and this is specifically for a lot of the women, you'll go in thinking I'm not 100% qualified. I was about 10% qualified from my perspective. They thought differently. Even if you think you're not 100% qualified. And this is for the men too. This is for everyone.  And then we'll get a little further on around cybersecurity, because I'm a geek and I gotta get my cybersecurity stuff in here. One of the things that you'll see is that sometimes the job descriptions are written by security engineers and they don't know any better that they need people that aren't all security engineers. You need diversity. So they write these job descriptions that nobody, though 25 years of cybersecurity experience. And when they bring the job description to me and they're like, cyber didn't exist 25 years ago. What are you doing here? And what you find is people will overwrite job descriptions. Go in anyway, because you're good. You're gonna be able to make it. I worked in, I was the head of security for 10 years there and I did physical security and investigations. And then, oh, one of the things. There was a group of Albanians. They came from the Russian circus. They de-factored and they came to the United States and what they were doing is they were breaking in to grocery stores and into the safes. And they would crack the safes and then they take all the money out and they'd leave. And the FBI actually thought it was kind of crazy when I told them, hey, we've got hundreds of these. So I organized the Food Marketing Institute. We put together a program with all the other grocery stores and there was no internet at the time still. So we were faxing these documents in and we brought them together and brought it to the FBI who opened up a major case called the Yugoslavians, Albanians and Croatian, the Yaks. And what they were doing was raising money for the war in Herzogovina. And we were able to follow them everywhere they were on the East Coast. And after we moved them out of the grocery stores that they actually moved into like the Home Depots of Loaves because hey, if you broke into our store you've got food and money, but if you broke into a loaves you could actually get the sledgehammers and heavy equipment that they needed for other jobs. And I knew nothing about safes but I befriended a guy that ran a city safe company in Jersey City. And we sat down and designed a safe that they couldn't break into. And that's how we got a moved off out of the A&P food stores and into these other big box locations. I actually ended up doing speaking and conversations with law enforcement all over the United States because they had seen this crime group but they didn't quite know what it was and we started connecting all the pieces together to get the FBI involved. So even one simple citizen can be the conduit to be able to get law enforcement to understand what's going on and make it work. Just because it sounds preposterous doesn't mean it is. I got a job because of a sponsor.  Sponsors are incredible, powerful people. They will see things that you don't see. The first thing I will tell you with sponsors is even if what they say sounds crazy, listen to them. They know better and do it. The worst thing you can do with a sponsor is they give you the greatest advice ever or provide you with here is a job on a silver platter for you and you go, yeah, no, I don't want that. There's a reason why they want you to do it and you should look at that because not only will you make friends for life but you'll also propel your career. Leaving the FBI was one of the hardest, leaving the Army was the hardest thing I had to do but leaving the FBI, I was like, okay, I really like this thing and I'm good at it but that's what got me into corporate America and that's one of those roads that I took even though it sounded a little crazy at the time.  The biggest virus out there is like lovebug, right?  I started there in February 2002 and six weeks later, the head of IT security for Avaya decided to go back and work at Lucent. Avaya had just split from Lucent and he said, eh, I'm going back to Lucent. So off he went. My boss came into my office and said, hey, Marine, how'd you like to be the head of IT security? May? Yes, sign me up now. That's the job I want because I knew when I was over at A&P that I had to learn this thing called IT, this internet, this technology was coming out, it needed me, I'm an electrical engineer, I should be doing this. And so I said, yeah, what I didn't know that I just signed up for was Avaya was going to be a sponsor of the World Cup in Korea and Japan in 2002. If somebody could get me water, I would love you forever. Thank you. And so voiceover I paid. Does everybody know? That's what runs your phone. In 2002, it was not in production. 2002 was not in production. First time ever on a world stage, Avaya decided to showcase their voiceover IP in Korea and Japan. And I had just signed up to run the Security Operations Center, not a term that was wildly used at the time for the entire World Cup network. And I would tell you that I had the best master's degree education in network security from a guy by the name of Greg Sautin, who had been Russian, he's now American citizen, of Russian descent, who sat down and told me everything he knew. And I learned it and we created the plan. And what I learned was this. I don't always have to know everything about everything. I'm a West Planner and we like to do that, but that's not the best thing. Trust the people who work for you. Understand what they know and listen to them, empower them. Greg and I created the plan and implemented it. And from my position as a director of security at Avaya, the more important thing was the relationships. It was my FBI experience knowing how to get in touch with the FBI in Seoul, Korea, because the South Koreans were hard knocking. They were scanning my network so hard they were starting to turn it over because they wanted to know what the technology was. Can you imagine? We put this like IP, intellectual property for internet protocol on a live stage in Asia. First go around and we got knocked all over the place. The only ones who didn't knock, which is surprising now these days, were the Chinese. In 2002, they were not knocking and looking at that technology. The South Koreans were. And what I used in a discussion with, now I'm a woman, so I took the marketing director who was a man and I would talk to him and then he would talk to the translator who then would talk to the South Korean law enforcement who then would all take it back and that's how the conversation went. And what we did out there is I convinced them that if they continued to scan the network and it would cause to fail on this grand stage in South Korea, it would bring bad faith. They would be seen as failures and that we needed them to not attack the network like that, to not scan it, not attack, but to scan it, do not scan it to bring it down. And that's how we stayed up. That's exactly how we stayed up. The other thing that we learned then was the switches in the network were made by Lucent, our sister company. And an individual of Polish descent who took an Avaya course in Poland, the same time that the World Cup was coming, had found a fatal flaw and a backdoor vulnerability in our network. So we're very concerned that we're gonna have an insider threat of epic proportions at the final, right? Little bit worrisome. So diplomacy works well. We gave that individual four free tickets to the final of the World Cup, all expense paid in Japan. Because if he was sitting in the stadium, he wasn't going to be hacking. And that's how we were able to keep the network out. The biggest vulnerability to that network ended up being we had one system failure. In Japan, the culture is that they're very trustworthy. There's a sign that says, do not enter. People do not enter. So trying to get the land closet locked where the servers were was a little difficult. The only outage occurred when the cleaning lady went into the land closet to vacuum. She unplugged our server to plug in her vacuum. That was my average. And so I learned this is not every insider threat is really intentional. Most of them will end up being something, look at what you see and you're going to see a pattern that might say the intent is not there. It is just collateral damage. And that becomes very important for my cyber warriors because everybody thinks it's somebody from somewhere else that's hacking us. From there, so I go back and they moved me to the law department. And as much as I love lawyers, okay, the lawyers and I didn't see each other and Medco made me an offer to go up and work at Medco as your chief security officer. So I left and went up to Medco. And now we're talking in New Jersey, we're all talking just on 278, right? I moved from one company to another. It's great, New Jersey was like this, my son could stay in school, it all worked out. What I learned over at Medco, Medco was a pharmacy benefit company. What's that? Most of you don't have prescriptions or at least after the first four rows, okay? Most of you don't have prescriptions, okay? So in the healthcare system, when you get a prescription, whether you get a CVS or Walgreens or wherever, there is a system underneath that checks that you didn't get one at four doctors and you're doing something you shouldn't be doing, your benefit company, your insurance company actually uses these exchanges. Medco had the prescription history of 65 million Americans in their database. That's what we were protecting. But out of that, what was coming is privacy rules, security rules, Sarbanes, Oxley around the financials, all were coming out. And so all of this regulation was coming out all at once. It did a lot of good, especially in healthcare because it got us to a bare floor. Now we're gonna move that on with some other work that we're doing with the government right now on moving those regulations further on. But it got us there. But I learned about IT controls. The other thing I learned is sitting there in March 2010, the Chinese hard-knocked every single healthcare company in the United States, every single one. And there were only two types of companies. Those who knew what had happened and those who didn't. But it happened. And we were one of the ones and what I realized was the federal government wasn't helping me at all and the local and state were the only ones that had cyber defenses that were actually interested in talking to us. And so it became, okay, what are we gonna do here? Because the government, there was no CESA Homeland Security looking at these things at that point in time. All right, Johnson and Johnson, this is a fun stuff. So 12 years ago, over 12 years ago, I went to Johnson and Johnson, okay? Remember, I really liked the big jobs and I was CESA Chief Security Officer at Medco and I got a call from a recruiter. Are you interested in going to Johnson and Johnson? It's for the head of IT security, Chief Information Security Assistance. It's only IT, really. And then the reason why I said yes, and this has to do with work-life balance and family is that it was two hour commute up to Medco and I had had an apartment that I stayed at during the week but I spent a lot of time away from my husband. And he had been down in D.C. for a long period of time working on the World Trade Center and there was a lot of investigation that was presented to Congress but we were now like, okay, what are we doing here? So I'm driving past, I'm an hour into my commute, I look over to the right, it's the J&J building that I'd be working at and after the light turn red and I'm sitting there, I hit the phone to call the recruiter and say, yes, I'm interested because now I'd be to work after an hour instead of two hours. And I said, okay, and I can't, it's like a smaller job. It's only IT security, right? Because it was before IT security was a really big thing. This is where I ran into what I'll call my third mentor. Laverne Council, she's a black female CIO and she saw my resume, she saw that I was a West Point graduate and she wanted me to come to interview. And I said, sure. What I found out during the interview was Laverne Council was supposed to be in the class of 1980 at the US Air Force Academy. She turned it down, she went to another school. But she was so intrigued with the military and what it represented, she wanted the brand in her IT organization. And so I joined, I liked her, I liked the interview panel, I liked what I was gonna do there, I liked the team I was gonna work with. So I said yes. I started out in that organization. We had 28 FTE in the entire global IT security network of J&J. We went to 26. I was going nowhere fast. I presented my IT, I worked with a consultant Deloitte and we created the strategy and presented it. When I left in January, I had 390 full-time equivalent employees and 300 contractors worldwide. I got the best MBA that I didn't pay for in my entire life. Learning how to run an organization of that scale and magnitude. Over 128 million dollars per year of technologies that we were running. And it was because, again, it goes back to listen to the people that you have, understand what's going on. I was ready to retire in February 2020. Went in, performance appraisal time, told my boss, hey, I'm at that tender little age. I think in September, by September, I wanna retire. On April, first start of April of 2020, I called them, because we were all out, we were all out of what we were doing then. And I said, Jim, we're making a vaccine. I can't leave now and I'll stay till we get to the other side of this. J&J decided to make a vaccine. A typical drug in its production, at any company, is over 10 years. It takes 10 years to produce a drug in the United States from the very first genome, all the way through to an approved FDA drug. We did it in 14 to 16 months. Things were moving. One of the things that came, and there were many, many other companies out there trying to do the same, Lily, Merck, Pfizer, Moderna, AstraZeneca, they were all doing the same thing. Most of them fell to the side. And the one thing, and I really wanted to retire, I was really ready to retire, but it became very clear I'm about mission. When I raised my hand on that plane at West Point, and I said I would defend against all enemies foreign and domestic, I meant it. And even though, at 17 years old, I could never conceive that I would learn a new technology and then be the best at defending it, defending in cyberspace, I could have never conceived that at 17, but somewhere along the way, all those things I had learned, all those opportunities, all those doors that were opened, put me on this stage, and it's very few times in your life, you'll feel this, and you're like, I'm right here at the right time doing the right thing, and this is gonna be good for the world. And that's what we did. J&J created that vaccine, and you can work with J&J for 100 years, and you still will never know the process of how a drug is, we learned it in security because we had to stay one step ahead of all the clinical, and the truth be known, the reason why I went down to visit General Gaines is because they had a CRISPR, and because they had that CRISPR and it was in the book about J&J's board member and all the work that they had done on genome therapy, I wanted to go talk to somebody who had one and what they were doing with it, it was a self-discovery. But, so J&J starts making this vaccine. I get calls from governments around the world asking me, hey, we don't think our systems, our cyber defenses are as good as J&J's, will you let us know if you hear something? My very first call was to Chris Krebs, who's the director of CISA and Homeland Security. Chris, we got a problem. And out of that, he helped launch Operation Warp Speed. And they put a general in charge, and the general knew nothing about IT security but knew a heck of a lot about physical security. And so I helped educate him enough and tell him and help him get with the right agencies. I need you to get the FDA in the background, I need you to get NSA, I'm gonna need some help here. And every week I got to talk to the good general and we discussed those things. During that time, in 20, we had a 30% increase in ransomware. In 21, we had a 30% increase in ransomware. In 22, we had a 30% increase in ransomware. Additionally, the day that we snitted our patent for our vaccine is the same day. Putin came out and said, oh, we already have a vaccine. And put it in his daughter's arm, June 21. Well, we were doing a whole lot of looking for insider threat at that point in time. Cause how the hell could he know that the day we submitted? Well, he might've learned something out of the government but he didn't learn it from us. We checked all our systems, we had the right technologies in place to know where that vaccine string was and whatever. What we did find out, little known fact, is we had an individual who had to go through and this wasn't a leak, right? This is just one of those, when you think it's an insider threat and it's not really an insider threat, it's probably something else, the water. What we found out was the regulatory department needed to print out all 600 pages. They have to review all 600 pages of the submission to make sure there's no spelling errors, everything's right, everything's accurate, all the data is correct. We're talking about data accuracy. And the individual, what you didn't realize is we had opened up the ability to print in their house. So she sent it to her Google Drive so she could print it. But we could trace it and find out and then we contacted her. But we're all sitting there like, oh my God, do we have an insider? And oh yeah, better yet, she was of Russian descent. It was perfect, it was like a perfect storm. She was gonna go to jail. We had her dead to rights.    And ask her why she printed to Google. We'll come to find out. She didn't know that she could print just normally on her home printer by just clicking print. And so she sent it to the Google because there's no way she was gonna read 600 pages online. Crisis averted. The data, because you know what? No Russian spy sending it to Google Drive because it just didn't make sense. We were talking about forensics earlier, right? Like these facts aren't adding up. Nobody's sending that to your Google Drive. Not if you're trying to hide it, because I got that. So anyway, we talked to her, explained what she could do. She was very happy and we were very happy that we didn't have an insider, but we had Putin. So it seemed like every time we were getting someplace and we used outside manufacturing of that vaccine and every when we were doing the assessments, what we found was there were parts of the, some of the companies weren't ready for a cyber attack of the magnitude we were seeing. And by the time we got to the fourth one, and this was with the government of South Africa, they redesigned the entire plant to make sure it was sustainable. And they were the only ones who didn't suffer attack. The other was as much luck as we had had with the FDA submitting our submissions, we had to submit worldwide. Well, the Europeans who have GDPR, which is this grandiose privacy law that's supposed to protect everybody's privacy. Well, the European medical agency had no cybersecurity, so they lost not only our first submission, it wasn't detrimental to us, but our first submission, but Pfizer's and Moderna's all at the same time. And so again, it's that influence in those areas in what you can do. So I'm about at my wits end, and the vaccine is January of 2022, I think at that point, and our vaccine is about to roll. We get a denial of service attack, which means it's just somebody smacking against your network so hard, 17 times our network strength. And only because I had read a piece of Intel a couple months prior that said DDoS attacks were starting to pick up in healthcare, did we start, we made the sure, I pushed that that technology went to the forefront. We had installed the devices two weeks prior to the attack. Just in time, security delivery is good as gold, okay? Two weeks too late, it had been another story, but we were able to sustain. In January, when the first trucks rolled out of our Kentucky distribution center, they created video. There was not a dry eye in the entire corporation when they watched that because of so much that had gone into it. And that was, and then the vaccine rolled out, and then I'm like, okay, time to retire here, time to retire, and we're getting towards the end of the year, and it looks like Russia is going to invade the Ukraine. And so at that point in time, in the position that I had, we had created a new technology that had, we had created, we had been watching the Russians and the Ukrainians for at least five years prior. Not Petia was out of that region. It was the Ukraine, by the way. It was Medox, it was a tax software that was an upload that the Russians had corrupted the server. And that caused not Petia for those companies that completely failed. And out of that, I had told my team, how long, how long people does it take to take the network down between us and the Ukraine? Well, Marine, it takes a couple weeks, and we've got to send people here, we've got to send people there, and I go, you got five seconds. I want five seconds for gold. My head of security engineering and architecture, Nile Casey, he's a good friend of mine. He's in New Zealand. He goes, Marine, that's not possible. And I go, it's only impossible for others.  And so they started working on it in 2016, and they were able to get it where they could take it down immediately, but they couldn't bring it back up. I said, no, down's good. You got to bring it back up, because once we need it. Just prior to the Russians invading the Ukraine, we got a technology called Vscaler, which gave us that capability, so five seconds up, five seconds down. We can do it.  You can't do it. What's it gonna take to do it? And you give them all the capabilities to get stuff done. They will get stuff done. Now some of it may be reliant on technologies that aren't available, but they'll push on the vendors to get the technologies they need, because this whole living in this world, leadership in this space, and especially in cyber, it's about working together in the ecosystem. We all bring something different to the table that we all need to defend, to defend our networks, to defend our country, to defend our companies. I have a bunch of slides that talk about the internet, and let's see, let me see where we are. We're an hour in, aren't we? Okay, all right, so what I'll do is, I've moved through all that, so you're not engaged, you don't have to worry. But what did the slide say? Okay, in today's world, we talk a lot about going digital.  Let's go digital, let's go to the cloud. Let's do this, let's do that, what does that mean? Well, let me talk to you about data, and computing of data. So back in the olden days, okay? When I was a young pop just about your age, we had mainframes. There's still mainframes that are out there, they still exist, but mainframes was the main way we computed. All the data was here, and the only way you could get to it was through something called rackf, and it gave you entitlements to look at data. You could see everything that was touched, you knew who looked at the data, and how you looked at it with these things called green bar reports. And the older folks in the audience all sort of laugh, right? This morning, or this afternoon when I was picking up my car at Avis, they had a pin dot printer. Pin dot printers were used for these green bar reports, right? So Avis can tell me all they want, that look at our new website, they're running on crap, because you don't have pin dot printers that work if you, unless you have really old applications underneath. So what happened? Okay, so I told you about these mainframes. And then in the late 1990s, everybody thought it would be cool, and we would go to this thing called the PC. And it was client server, and apps would be developed, and then apps were put on there. And it was all client server. So in the 80s, when I had to do, like I only took a file folder home to utilize and read at night. Now I could take a laptop home, which was like six file cabinets worth of data. Okay, this really from a security perspective wasn't cool, but that's what we did. And then from client server, what happened is we started doing things like, I'll put all my data in somebody else's place, and then I'll try to connect to it. Okay, HR firms did a lot of that, right? CA and some of the HR databases they were all run that way. It wasn't the cloud yet, it was just I'll take my data and put it over in your location in a client server over there. Then the cloud came out. With the cloud, it was, oh, wait a minute, we can put it all out there. Well, when people said, oh yeah, we'll put it all out there. There's two things that they forgot about. One is the network to get there and get back. And the second one was security, okay?  It'll be cheaper. It was and you got hacked. It was just, it was really simple. Then what you have and what you see a lot today is you have companies that have a little bit of mainframe and they have a little bit of client server and they have a little bit of cloud. That is not a digital environment. Even if you have a website on top of it, it is not digital. Then you'll see companies like Uber or Lyft who, you see a little car. You can follow you where you're at. You can pay online. It connects. It does all these things. That's digital. And what is it gonna take to get there?  You're going to have to figure out what you're gonna do with it to get it so it can be used in a digital manner or a cloud manner or everything everywhere. Then that work has changed over time. As I told you, I have my story of voice over IP in what I did and that was a turning point.  And then as we move into 5G, I mean real 5G, not 10G like what, is it Verizon? Who has that, oh, I have 10G. I'm like, no, you don't, that's not even a thing. And we move into everything everywhere, communicating with everything. It changes all the security profile. Why is that important to all of you? You are the talent. You and this university are creating the people that will solve the security problems and issues and opportunities. Because it's not always a problem because for every bad thing that comes out, 10 good things come out of it. Each and every one of you. If you remember correctly, I told you I was an electrical engineer. I was an electrical engineer because he didn't have computer science then, because he didn't have computers then, all right? And I figured it out. And every single one of you is going to be able to figure it out. And even the person who says to me, oh, well, I know nothing about computers. Well, neither did I. You can learn. You can learn and understand and make it happen. And that's why it's about you. Your capacity for learning. And now some of you have spent one year, two years, three years, four years. Hopefully we don't have any five years here, but maybe we do. But you have spent all those years learning. What you need to know for the future hasn't even been created yet. So the learning from Norwich is that you've learned how to learn. You've learned how to be leaders. To learn when even when, oh, crap, I don't know. We're going to create a vaccine. What am I going to do here? They have created and instilled in each one of you that ability, that strength of character to be able to say, I got this. I got this country. You're in my hands. I can lead. And some of you will choose to do that in uniform. I applaud you. I did my five years in uniform. And one of the few regrets, one of the very few regrets is I wasn't able to serve longer. That I wasn't able to become a three or a four star general. Because I would have loved that. That would have been me inside. I had to do other things. And I had to be a champion, a general on the battlefield called cyber when there were no other people who understood what the battlefield consisted of. But you will. Because you have the makings and the learnings that started at this school. And you're going to take them with you. This is where I come in and I talk to you. What are you going to do? These are all the things, all the networks I have. I think at dinner, I think I expanded my network five out, right? Yeah, you can be part of that network. You want to do that? Network, join groups. Whether if you go into the military, there's all sorts of groups in that space. How many people are on LinkedIn?  You should all be on LinkedIn tonight. Marine Allison, LinkedIn. LinkedIn with me. My group is your group. My tribe is your tribe. That's what you need to do. Be bold. No people. All the groups, when I joined A&P, I was a gunslinging FBI agent, okay? Could shoot a possible. It was pretty darn good. Could run real at house. I didn't know anything about retail shrink. I sat in a meeting the very first day at A&P Food for eight hours. And it took me to the ninth hour to figure out what retail shrink is. But you know what? I learned and then I realized it's just math. And if I use the scan reports, I can find out what the shrink is. And if I can find out what the shrink is on certain products, on certain cashier lines, I'm gonna be able to find out who's doing the wrong thing. Because they all should be average. Well, maybe except for the express line. But then you could see that. And once you get that data, then you have the power to do something with it. So network, now we get to the end. Nothing is to be feared. It is only to be understood. We must understand more so that we may fear left. This was the inscription on my high school year book. This is the quote I put in there. And it has been so true. When I wanted to go to Wellesley, and then I would settle on the Air Force Academy, but I went to West Point. I made lemons. I made lemonade out of the lemons that I was provided. You have been provided one of the best educations that you'll get ever in the United States, here at Norwich. Because it's not only about your academic education, it's also about your physical and your leadership and your spiritual education. All of those things will make the whole person. Cyber security, internet, didn't exist. If that didn't exist, what are you gonna learn? What is out there before you? Can you only imagine? We all kind of, you know, the space force, right? But think about it, what could it be? Did I have anybody who went space force? Ah, there he is, he's up at the corner. Raise that hand, be proud of that. You get the most awesome uniforms ever. You're not gonna be in pink and tans. You're gonna be in Star Wars heaven. You'll be good, you'll be cool. But can you imagine? He's gonna learn about satellites. He's gonna learn all about these satellites and rockets and all of this amazing technology and where it's gonna go and how do we defend ourselves in that space? This is what I ask each one of you. You don't have to be the person with the highest GPA, but you can learn something new every single day. Every single day, figure out something new to just ponder on. And it's not just catnip, okay? It can be other things. But to some of those, don't you like wonder how the heck does I get the cat to do that? Be authentic, be you and don't be apologetic about it. If you're space force, be space force. Be proud, okay?  It's okay. All of those things, you know, we all wear a uniform or we all wanna look alike. But every single one of you brings something diverse and different to this auditorium. And that's what you should be proud of and you should own it. And when you leave here, oh, you're one of those cadets at Norwich. Yeah, I'm pretty darn proud of that. But people will always try to put you in a box. Don't live in anybody's box but your own. Be in the box you wanna be and don't care what they're going to say to you. Get a mentor, be a mentor. We'll get a sponsor and be a sponsor. Those are very important things. I'm president of West Point Women. It represents the 7,000 West Point Women who have graduated, God bless you, in 43 years, 7,000, that's it. It represents every single one of them. We help each other every single day. Every single day we're helping to pull somebody out. It's so easy to like scoff, but how about be the helping hand? Be the person that others want to be. So we were talking about women in the military and then after the military I became an FBI agent and that really didn't help my demeanor much. But when I joined Corporate America, I took a five by seven card and on it, I wrote, be kind, be kind, not be kind. And I still have that card. It's on my desk out in my farm in Pinata because we all need a reminder because sometimes it's just easy to not be kind but being kind makes you a better human being and makes people want to listen to you and makes people trust you. And that is what is very important. And when I hear from some of the young men that I used to coach on my son's soccer team, one of them had a birthday yesterday, he's a major up at West Point teaching German. And when I go up to West Point later in May, he's gonna be there and to see the kindness that we were at, he as when I coached him in soccer and to now where he is and he's up at West Point, even though he's not a West Point grad, he's giving back. And that is the type of kindness that we need to have and mentor. I also skip one, north star. No, where the heck you're going, okay? You don't have to have it all mapped out. I love it when people come to me and they want advice and they ask this question. Mrs. Allison, I'm gonna do this and this and this and by the time I'm 30 and then I'm like, do you have a family in there? Do you have a life in there?  Oh no, I wanna be you one day and this is how I'm gonna do it. Well, what I tell people is is, the north star is not a direct path. Much of it is weaving in and out and being agile in your life and taking the lemons and making them into lemonade and good things are gonna happen or bad things will be happen. But you have to look at it and say, okay, now what do I do with this? Someone once asked me, Marine, is there any mistakes you made in your career? There's no mistakes in my career. It's the career that I had and I'm proud of it. Now, maybe I should have become the veterinarian I wanted to be when I was 16, but I didn't go that route. I took another route. And so, I don't have grats that I'm not a veterinarian. I've got two horses for God's sake. You can be sure I'm not upset that I'm not a veterinarian. I like animals, but it doesn't mean I have to be that vet. And those are the things. Find out what you like. I didn't even know. Right here I took electrical engineering. Graduated, became an MP, military police officer, undercover drug officer, and it wasn't until I was at A&P and we were starting to look at all our data that we had and I'm like, oh, I kinda like this IT stuff. Like, I really like this IT stuff. And so, you don't have to know right now what you're gonna be. Just know you're gonna go in a direction and keep going in that direction. You'll find, it's a lot more fun that way. And the thing that I would tell people is you're not gonna know everything, but you can read about it and you can apply it. The best education you got at Norwich is not calculus. It is going to be the fact that you know how to read and apply and that you know how to do research and you can look things up and you can go, God, I don't know anything about this, but I'm gonna learn. Many times I am not a drug dealer, but I can figure out how to take one down. And that is what you can do by just reading and applying. Don't get in a comfortable place for too long. You can go there for a while, all right? Christopher Columbus did not find the New World, well, I'm not sure he even found it, but others found it before him, but he gets credit for it, by staying in Spain. You've got to move, you've got to see things. And if you get into a place where you're comfortable and you're so comfortable that you're not learning, it's time to learn something new. I am one of the finest CISOs in the world and I have no problem stating that from what I've gone through in the last 12 years and then years before that and years before that. I needed to learn. So what did I do? Well, I failed at retirement. Let me tell you that, I have failed at retirement, but you know what I didn't get to do? I didn't get to spend any time with venture capital and figuring out how we get innovative technologies in cybersecurity out of the venture capital world. So I joined a ton of firms, okay? I don't think any of them is gonna make me five nickels. Not gonna make any money out of them. But you know what I learned? Crap, when the SVB, when the Silicon Valley Bank had its issue, almost every one of them that I was working with was concerned with how they were gonna make payroll. And if they hadn't made payroll, they could have been out of business. And that whole tier of technology could have just been washed away. A whole tier. So now my recommendation to Jen Easterly, the director of CISA, is that we need to look at the resiliency and viability of the funding of venture capital for cybersecurity. But I wouldn't have been able to make that recommendation if I didn't just go out and play in VC world.  Now I'm into PE, private equity. How does that make that work? And where do they get their money? And what are these funds? And who's putting money in these funds? And even though I'm not a finance person, I know nothing about it. I'm gonna learn. Because that's how I can figure out our industry and make it better. And work with government agencies to make recommendations on what do we need in this space? Hey, we don't have labs like we used to. Who's making all the new technology? VCs? And if that is how it happens, then we need to make sure we have the resiliency. This is my family. That's my son. Karen has met my son. That's my daughter-in-law. That's my grandson, the greatest joy of my life, Quinn, and my husband of 43 years. Right there. Your family is your greatest gift. It will be your greatest gift. And you always must remember them and bring them along on the journey. You will not do this alone. Life is incredibly difficult if you try to do it all by yourself. You'll be the person making the catnips. I can guarantee you. But that is my family. My son is a chip off the old block. He works at J&J also. I told you in the IT department. And he is a helicopter pilot turned fixed wing. The head of the aviation reserve unit happens to be my West Point classmate. And he calls her Auntie Anne. So that is his network that he's used. My daughter-in-law is a physician assistant in cardiology. My grandson's mission, he's older than that. He's seven now, is to outrace myself and to find his fishing pole that I lost on the St. John's River last week. And then my husband, who was one of the people I am most proudest of, he was the chief bomb technician in Newark, New Jersey and the FBI for World Trade Center One. And he had the bead on at least two of the terrorists for World Trade Center Two. And he had fallen off the roof. I wouldn't wait for me to hold the ladder. And a week before 9-11, he fell off the roof and had major surgery. So he couldn't be a first responder. And I think pretty much saved his life. Do not go where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path and leave the trail. Any questions? Don't be shy? Yeah, we have. All right. I'll take any questions, come on. I'd like to hear from the students. So we have one coming down here. Yeah, come on. The mic, we like to do it that way. So you take a swig of water there, my friend. And we have some coming down. Please just give me a moment. I gotta formulate this question for you. Oh, it's okay. Anybody else? Come on down. Come on, come on, this is a ton of questions. You get the first one out. Go ahead. Awesome. Thank you, ma'am, for being here. I appreciate it. It was a really great experience to hear your journey. A question I have for you is not everyone's perfect. A lot of people make mistakes. How have you been able to bounce back through mistakes and overcome adversity throughout your career? So as I told you, I had no mistakes. Okay, they're all learning opportunities, okay? You know, it's how you look at something, right? If you look at something like, oh darn, right? I didn't get signal core. You know, my life is ruined. I didn't get signal core. Okay, I'll go in peace. It's really your mental attitude of how you take it. I'm like, oh, in peace, that's really cool. That's a branch where women can serve just about everywhere men can, because on the day they couldn't serve everywhere. I was like, I can do that. Yeah, that'll be cool. I'll learn that, a kind of life law enforcement. That'll be, you know, you have to be inquisitive about stuff.  No, it's not. It might be the best opportunity. Hey, my best opportunity, I went to West Point. The only place that might have been better was Norwich. Okay, but I didn't even know about it. Didn't know what he told me, right? And that's what I'm saying is that you have to be open to what happens, and then the wonder of it, right? You know, have you ever gotten lost and gone, wow, I didn't know this was out here. This is cool, right? If you hadn't gotten, if you hadn't made a mistake, you wouldn't have gotten there. It's harder these days with Google Maps, but you can occasionally get lost. Thank you, ma'am. Thank you. We have a question for you. Oh, ma'am, I'm Dennis Kuntz. I was just... Where are you from? I'm from West Texas. West, how did you get to Norwich? The school paid me. Ah, there you go, there you go, sounds good. So, when it comes down to your personal leadership philosophy, what are the, I guess, three first striking things that should define a leader and how a leader should act, especially around their subordinates? Be kind. Be kind, yeah? That is probably the very first one. Be compassionate, okay? And I guess kind and compassionate, you could probably roll them into the other, right? Listen to what they have to say, okay? Be open to what they're saying to you, okay? And when the world was gonna come to an end because of COVID, the thing that I found out was, it would have been easy for me to curl up in a ball and have a good cry, but I had to be strong. I had to be strong mentally to be able to talk through it, even when, in my heart, I didn't feel strong. I had enough doubts about what was gonna happen. So that's what I would say, is be kind, be compassionate, and be strong. Hi, are you from West Texas too? No, ma'am. Good evening, ma'am. My name is Kedet Dontran, I'm from NAMM. Ah, there you go. A really long, a really long way. You gotta take two, three different flights. It's almost like coming from Florida to here. Same difference, same difference. Same difference. I took a class last, yeah, I took a class last year. We were talking about military history, and one of the topics that popped up, she was play Blasting Sabaton, The Night Witches, the song over the loudspeaker, when the teacher was teaching us this, but she was talking about the Night Witches and how one officer in the Soviet Union back during World War II, came up with the idea that she's going to put together a unit of bombers, of just women. And she has to put, to do the training, organization, figure out the logistics, figure out what kind of planes they're going to be flying, what kind of missions they're going to be conducting from scratch, because, well, if she's not gonna do it, nobody will. And she blazed the trail. And I looked at that story and I thought to myself, you know what, I want, maybe one day I want to do something like that. But the question is chaos. When you deal, when you blaze a trail, you walk through a patch of grass, you see tall grasses about this tall everywhere. How do you know where to go? How do you know what to step on, what not to? How do you navigate through the chaos of vines and trees and bushes and leaves and maybe animals and maybe a stick somewhere that pokes up? Which I'll put the snake too. Don't forget the snake. There's a lot of those in my country. They taste like chicken. It's like Florida. We got a lot of them down there too. They do taste like chicken. Yeah. But not chicken. The chicken tastes like fish. So out of chaos, and one of the things is, it's relying on some of your instinct and your intuition. Remember I told you about the North Star and I talked about mission and the integrity you have and the knowledge you have. Leaders make the best decision at the moment. People can come, historians can come years later and tell you whether that was a good decision or a bad decision. They're really good at that from their desks. Typing up the book, whether you were good or bad. But the reality is you can only make the best decision for what you have in front of you. And you will have the knowledge and expertise. You just have to listen to it. Most of the bad decisions or decisions that are second-guess later are because we don't listen to the what's around us, what our people are telling us. We are not looking at our North Star and we're not coming at it from the mission. And once you get those clear guideposts in your life, you know which way to go. At West Point there's a cadet prayer and there's something called, and most everybody I know who's memorized this which is every cadet West Point or I know is there's something called the harder right instead of the easier wrong. And even though there's just a phrase and a prayer, there's been a million times in my life and that I've gone, is this the harder right or the easier wrong. And because I had that moral guidepost and even I go okay, it would have been really easy for me to say in February of 2020, I retire, I'm out, have a nice life. That would have been the easier wrong. But I made a decision which was around the mission, around the we have to get a vaccine out the door that to make sure I had the compass in the right direction. Once the compass is in the right direction, you follow the right path. And then it's the intuition inside. And there's been a million times, especially in cyber, I don't know if this is the right answer, but this is the only thing we have and we've got to make it and it feels right to go this way. And time will tell whether you're right or wrong or you have to course correct. And that becomes very important. But you have to listen to that inner voice. You have to have your moral compass. You have to have your mission and you have to have that more start. And once you put those together, you go, oh yeah, I get this. It's there. You're gonna have follow up? Oh, you want? There's, every day there's another business idea. There's another venture, another GoFundMe, another crowdfunding project. A lot of them fail. And I'm sure that a lot of them follow that same idea too. They, maybe they learn from it, maybe they don't, but when they start it out, they all know. At least I hope they all know that it will work. But do that. Do they really know it will be a good business model or are some of them in it, especially in the cyber, because I feel very strongly about this. I find most of the VCs are in it to make money. They know nothing about security. They know nothing about mission. They might know a little bit of something about networking or something about data. But the companies that I find that are highly successful, their CEO has a mission. They understand what they're doing in the frame of cybersecurity and can articulate it why it's important. They're in it, and even if they have to sell their company, because the technology is the right technology and it may have to go to another company to launch it. And it's not just, yeah, there's a lot of failures in the VC market, but I would tell you, there's a lot of dud technologies and most of them have tried to sell them to me. And I've been there and they're not ready for prime time. They're not ready to launch. And I've even had some entrepreneurs come to me and it's like, well, really, I ask them about cybersecurity and they're like, well, it's not really, that's irrelevant because you have to do this. Has someone come to my office, right? J&J, about 20% of our business is in China. They tell me I could just block all the IP addresses in China. We wouldn't talk to our network in China. I said, I don't think that's going to work. And that is people who are into technology. Yeah, you can do that. Probably not a good idea. And that's where do you really understand the security side, the mission side, and the business side of what you're doing. And that's why most of them fail. Some of them are mismanaged, they go on big holidays and do big events and spend all the money instead of putting it into the technology. There's many, many reasons, but it's not one size fits all. Thank you, ma'am. Thank you. Let's give Marion a final round of applause. Thank you, Ms. Allison.


Hollywood's out here trying to trick me again. I watched the trailer for the new Twisters film, the new film, it's a straight up remake. One of the actors was on an interview recently saying, no, it's not a remake, it's not a sequel, it's not a prequel, it's its own movie. It's not its own movie. It's the same movie I saw in 1996 with Bill Paxton and Helen Hunt. This is the same movie, but with no emotion, no soul, no creativity. It somehow looks worse in the special effects department. Why is this movie being made? Easy, cash grab, it's got name recognition, it's gonna get some butts in the seats, or is it? Because I think people are getting smarter than that. We're waking up to this crap now and we're not gonna continue to drop $15 or so to go see a movie we already did 20 years ago that was done better.  Just watch the original again.


What's going on guys got Kyle here with late in sports cards. Oh boy Donnie's here. Oh boy Donnie's here Oh, Donnie's here. No. Oh, man. I just lost focus Donnie's here guys I got two boxes for Peter Peter M guys got 2023 Star Wars chrome and we've got a 2023 tops Sterling good luck Pete. Good luck Kyle I'm just gonna take over for a second Take over for a second and give Donnie a yellow card Yellow card finally finally the refs are freaking showing some discipline around here, man I think Dylan got you man Dylan grab this case of Sterling so in this box Got an auto already. It's gonna be Rose Tico on the refractor auto Nice one there. That is from the newer trilogy Star Wars That is Kelly Marie Tran as Rose Tico's code Got a grogu and sir, let's see we can get a sketch for you here still Pete.  I got a salacious auto wrong to get it to Donnie. He's still going dude. He wants the red card How would you say how would who orange we got mean nub on the orange that one is number 23 out of 25 Nice one there on the orange Very nice is the lowest number I've seen actually or I pulled I should say Padme on the refractor Victor gave me a red Bob who's great from finest It's gonna gem Got Palpatine got a grogu in sir Got manga madness that's gonna be hon hon and chewy there she looks a little scared DJ Yeah, the flawless for sure Like the I think you're good on that too and Sterling there's a refractor bucket grogu insert grogu got a refractor of grease dry dis grease dry dis That is a moniker's of Obi-Wan the negotiator is what everybody calls him Everybody calls him the negotiator These are not the joys you're looking for It's not really negotiating that's just Cheating yeah, he's yeah, Joe. It doesn't take long for Donnie here. I might give Joe a yellow cream leader Snoke How he was acting in our fortnight? Oh Joe's about to catch a yellow force is feisty right here now. I don't know Boris comes in feisty hold up on the yellow There's a manga madness for Hoffa Boys at Hoff got a moniker's race Skywalker Jedi That's what they call her Brace guy walker comma long name comma Jedi.  Oh, they have a yellow card emoji. Are you kidding? Oh, no one's probably has it from another which got it all you have to have it somewhere else We should have a We got a yellow we got a flag we got the card there's a refractor Vader nice one there Got a phoenix shan there's a forest again Forced for night skin Gotta be the batterer Chris sands. Oh nice one here first appearances case hit of Obi-Wan You go peak in the case hit there on the Obi-Wan Grand Inquisitor. That's technically Ben Kenobi though.  I feel you a grogu insert there with IG 11 I don't know. Ooh nice one here. We got another um, this is the What we call movie poster there? That is Darth Vader nice one there on the refractor as a nice another short print there and a ray refractor That is a red face of droopy eyes We've got manga madness. That's a That's a Han Solo getting frozen in carbonite Don't want that Don't want to be frozen in carbonite man That's how you that much. There's a moniker's Finn. That is his name go with the nickname there It's a little damage on that base Princess Leia Won't send a box for the base probably there's a Mandalorian on the refractor Box here oh and Lars and we got moniker's for the Mandalorian now Mando Mando the nickname Alrighty mr. Pete now we got 2023 tops sterling good luck sir. Let's see it. That's the first one I open had an icon The raging bull Jake Lamada. Oh Jake Lamada We've got Tops all-star cup rookie team all-star rookie cut team something like that silver slugger's award winners now Good luck here Pete Start with the start with the silver sluggers. That is very thick That is very thick. Come on silver slugger Whoa That's a forest card We've got Bat Barrel Otto one of one Xander Bogarts Boom that is as force of a card as you're gonna get Xander Bogarts on the Red Sox Bat Barrel boom There we go Pete That is dirty Boris is bringing the heat since he's been here man. Oh Dylan snagged this one for you Pete Xander on the Bat Barrel Otto that is dirty look how close the Otto is on the Bat Barrel to his actual Otto too That's kind of awesome Very nice one there Pete now. We got the tops all-star rookie cup team Let's see. Let's see. I thought that was gonna be the good one. So let's see here Yeah, of course the we pull the force card right in front of them This one is number to ten it's gonna be Anthony Rizzo on the triple relic Otto Really great box there for you Pete six of ten on the Riz Got a bat relic and two Two two jerseys there Alrighty there Pete that'll do it for your two boxes really nice couple boxes there sir great hit on the Bat Barrel Get those right out to you


So, hello everyone, hello everyone and thank you for attending this session. My topic today is email marketing down the open source way. I will talk about an email marketing software tool which is for sending new letters and email campaigns. Let me introduce myself first. I am a community advocate and community manager for PHP list. I am a Fedora ambassador which I suppose does not impress anyone here. I work in media volunteer and an open labs member which is a local open source community back in my country where I met all of these open source communities that I am involved with. So, PHP list is 100% open source software. It is licensed under the AGPL version 3 license. It is hosted on Github, was in Italy around 20 years back in 2000, in March 2000 and it is a community driven project. This is a simple screenshot from the PHP list dashboard which is what the administrators see. As of context, just a small parenthesis, I am employed to PHP list limited which is a company that offers support for customers that do not want to host the software themselves and they just want to use it. So what is this session about? About two years ago, we started thinking and reconsidering the development cycle we used to follow. So we started researching and meeting with each other and talking to each other and see what other development approach we could follow at that time until we end up to what we have here. Another thing to have in mind was that three different projects that were running simultaneously was the PHP list 3 which is the software we have now currently on version 3.5.0. PHP list 4 and the rest API which are working progress, PHP list 4 is a rewritten version of the one that we have now and the CMS which is the software used for the hosted clients. Why was considered a different development approach? First of all, releases at that time were feature based and not time based and that means that we would have a new release every time that all these list of features that were preset was met and implemented and not have a specific and concise time frame of the releases. Why was that a problem which we realized two years ago? First of all, we had a consistent time frame of the releases and nobody knew when we would have a new release and we would have a new release every three months or maybe every seven months. It would take way much longer for the community actually to benefit from the software itself because it would take longer to deliver the final product. The community couldn't get further involved and another thing that was very important to us was the testing phase which would take longer at the time because it was internal and there was no better version of the software. So meeting started, calls started going on because most of the team was spread in different cities and countries and we started considering an agile approach. What was considered on the way? So agile was the first thought but actually we had to put way much more thought from behind because we could not be as strict as agile would suggest. So we had to adapt somehow our activity and with the community and the releases and the features that we wanted to add. So how agile actually could we be? Do we have the resources to do that? How quickly could we adapt? How that would affect the way we're doing things? These are some of the challenges and thoughts that we had before we actually decide what to do and which we tried to resolve later. Some of the options that we had in mind was a six-month or a three-month or a one-month release cycle. We soon realized that the most agile approach would have been the one-month releases and that would solve actually the problem with earlier. How that would affect the way we are doing current things? We were doing current things at that time. But actually we were able to meet our deadline because one month is a very short amount of time and did we have the resources to implement everything that we had in mind at that time? As of context, the community was not much involved on the testing phase. So another thing that would come up was the upgrading process which would conclude on a ton of errors and we didn't want to have people spend time troubleshooting, upgrade or configuration problems, but we want them to focus on actually testing and using and trying the software. So that was then when the automatic updater was introduced. The automatic updater is a process in order to update the software easily and low the risk of errors. It's an automatic process and you don't have to actually have any technical skills in order to upgrade to the latest version. So we had to choose our tools, what we had in our defense. We kept using, instead of introducing actually a new learning curve, we thought that it would have been better to keep what we had and adapt it on a new way of doing things. We kept Mantis. Mantis is an open source back tracker in order to put our roadmap there, discourse in order to be in touch with the community. Next slide for our meeting notes and Jitsi for the daily stand up calls. The daily stand up calls were a key element actually to the communication between the team. They were very short calls of ten minutes where people who just mentioned what is a blocker to them and what they will do next. Just that. No questions. If you would have questions, you would schedule a different meeting in one on one meeting. Some of the challenges faced was actually deciding what is a priority and what is not. In a small team of developers, there is not much room of setting very high or more goals. So we had to be realistic on what we can actually achieve or not. And what to expect from the community. What happens when the roadmap goals are not met? Managed in the backup. How to manage the community involvement? We had people actually submitting very useful PRs and people who would just ask for features they dreamed about. So where we send after 17 months of working that way? We have a software which is 17 times more updated now. 17 times updated does not mean that have been implemented on the 17 features. It's more than that. We are currently on version 3.5.0 which was released only 10 days ago. We have community members submitting full requests on every release and I'm very happy and proud to announce that on every single release there have been at least one community contribution. Features get faster delivered back to the community and I would also want to add that the community is also involved on the testing process because about a week before the final release we have scheduled the beta release, the release candidate where people can actually install and check it. So that is all for me. It was a short presentation. I would like to thank you all for listening to me. Thank you. I'm interested to know how you became a community manager for this project? Oh, sure. Can I ask you to repeat the question? Oh, yeah, so the question was how I became the community manager of the project. About three and a half years ago in 2016 I joined Open Lab Server Space which is a community in Toronto, in Albania, in my country. And we organized a conference which is named Open Source Conference in Albania, Oskar. And there I met Fedora, I met Wikimedia and of course Ph. Belize, they had a book there. So I came in touch with email marketing. I had no idea what it was at the time, I was just a student. I was not interested into this marketing part. So I started meeting actually developers that used to work on that and people that were involved and about a year ago last year I also got employed and became the community manager. And I'm very happy. It was a step-by-step process. I think CEP is the right thing for that conference. Yes, it happened yesterday, I think. Some of the organizers are here. You can talk to them. Some of them are standing next to you. Yes, the CEP is already open so everyone who is interested can apply. Another question? I have another one. Sure. How did you find switching to a time-based release schedule? And how did you find that? Future-based. Now we are time-based like we have monthly releases. We have the release candidate on the 5th and the final release on the 11th of each month unless something urgent comes up and we schedule it for a few days. And have you noticed that that's changed the engagement with your community? Yes, because actually if I'm using something and I don't know when an update will come, we had updates if you go back and check the releases from the previous year you will see a release every three months and then every seven and then every five. So that was not consistent and people didn't have something to wait for because they didn't know when it will come. So now people have something to wait for and they know it's going to be there and the announcements are on the forum. I guess also if you're evaluating something like should I debt my tech stack on this piece here? If nothing happened to seven months, you're like... Yeah, yeah. Yeah, is this thing dead or? Yeah. Yes. Yeah, sure. How was your experience of managing your community? Has it been challenging for you at all? Can you raise your voice? Oh, sorry. Yeah, I was thinking about your experience in managing your community and getting contributions. Was it challenging to get people to contribute to it? Yeah, okay. So the question to summarise it is whether was there any challenging managing the community? So the BHPD community actually is consisted of people who are quite technical because the software itself, the software process requires some technical skills in order to install it. So people actually contribute are quite technical themselves and we don't expect young students to contribute. So most of these people, the way why they get motivated as they understand it is because they want a software as much complete as it could be with much more features. So that's why they get their hands dirty and work and submit all the time. So there are months and certain periods of time where we have more pull requests from the community and there are months where it's not that intense but still the fact that it's continuous, I would say, that's a very positive outcome from their engagement. Any other features that they're initiating by the portal because they are very in touch with them and they initiate community calls and they fold and they also criticize different changes that are made but the thing with our community, I feel that they have very strong opinions. And they are probably participating. We also support different community members. Councilor Ruffin, from that question, how technical do you need to be to be a community manager? Oh, you don't have to. Well, I'm not that technical as the community members but what I try to do, for example, we have scheduled several community calls where we would gather some community members and we were very interested in hearing their feedback because as Sola mentioned, which is also part of the team, some of them are, let's say, resellers, if I can call them like that, for the software itself, so they know it from the inside. So we are very interested in knowing actually what they want from it, how they want to see it in the future. So managing, I mean, I don't write code myself. I can read but I don't write code myself. So I would say that you don't have to be that highly technical in order to manage this group of people. I have a question about that. So if you don't need to be as technical as the community to be the community manager, what do you say are kind of like attributes or skills or qualities that you need to be successful as a community manager? On that particular case, I would say that I have been for more than three years involved with open source community as a community member myself. So I started actually as a volunteer before I get to this position. So at that time, I felt like the community manager was the person to actually go and ask questions and guide me until I figured out that I can do things and just let them know that I did that. And this is what people actually do because they are more experienced than me and I am very happy to hear from them what they do but they also don't expect me to approve it somehow or I don't know. We have also more technical people in the team so if they face technical problems or technical issues or the pieces of code that they submit on GitHub, so there are other people that can answer their questions and help them troubleshoot anything that comes up in the way. And it's also another thing that they help each other so they don't expect someone else to deal with their issues. So if I'm not the technical person but for example, I'm doing email marketing, right? So I can be also part of the community to join to this discussion and show what I'm expecting maybe from the software. Yes, absolutely. So another thing that I would love to see for Piet Pilis is that our forum is mainly full of technical issues. For example, I try to install it and then the database and error came up but I would love actually to see more marketers come on the way because most of the community, not necessarily the community but the people involved in this are system administrators themselves or coders or stuff like that but I would love also to see people that use the software in order to promote their business and make profit share tips and advices so that would be great to have such contributions. And one more question. So do you have any experience with like internal email marketing? Like do somebody use it for the internal marketing? So yes, we try to do our email marketing as well and send some newsletters and try. The last one that was sent was about a month ago where we actually asked for people to evaluate the product on other independent websites and platforms. Do you have another question? Yeah, I'm just wondering. Do you use Piet Pilis to do those email marketing? Absolutely! So you said that right now in the community it's primarily system administrators so what brings them to the community? They're not the end users of the product, right? Yes. What brings them there? We have many resellers actually of the product. So it has been proven that Piet Pilis is the most popular open source product and hence it's free and open source people are free to modify it so they change a lot of stuff so companies actually use the product and they ask for it from the system administrator to do their job. To figure it out. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We are running quickly out of time so any last question?