Women drive innovation across all areas at Censys, from engineering and product design, to research, marketing, and beyond. In celebration of Women’s History Month and our ongoing commitment to gender equality, we recently spoke with some of our incredible teammates about their work.
Himaja Motheram | Security Researcher
What kinds of projects do you work on at Censys?
As a security researcher at Censys, my role includes supporting Censys customers and the broader security community in understanding how to leverage our data to understand relevant internet phenomena and security vulnerabilities. This includes research for Censys’s State of the Internet Report, fingerprinting risks for critical vulnerabilities for ASM customers in the Rapid Response program, and other pieces of vulnerability and internet measurement research for the Censys blog.
What excites you most about your role? How do you see yourself and your team driving innovation here?
One of my favorite things about my role is that it rewards following my natural curiosity about the internet. Many of my projects have been at the intersection of taking an area that the community has questions about and going down rabbit holes to discover really cool insights. The field of cybersecurity is constantly evolving and there is no shortage of impactful questions we can answer with Censys data. The Research Team at Censys is a key differentiator here – our data-driven work connects with the community and builds brand recognition with the media, inbound marketing opportunities, and supports internal Customer Success and Sales efforts to help demonstrate our data superiority.
Going forward, what innovation do you hope to see occur at Censys or within the broader cybersecurity industry?
I would love to continue to see innovation in our data because it really is the product that differentiates us from the rest and it powers some of the best security teams in the world. I think we’re on the right track to expand our scanning capabilities and enrich both our hosts and certs datasets. As for the broader cybersecurity industry, I would like to see more of the amazing women revolutionizing this space get recognition for the work they do. It’s a small industry and it can get pretty insular, but it’s important to be mindful of whose voices are getting left out – especially when the experience of being a person on the internet as a woman or other underrepresented identity often differs wildly from the experiences of the majority of people designing security products.
Celestine Jahren | Senior Manager, Business Development
What kinds of projects do you work on at Censys?
In my role at Censys, I’m focused on setting up and managing our Sales Development and Customer Success functions internationally, which as you can imagine, means I get to work on a wide variety of projects. Some days, I’m strategizing with the team on our international expansion and investments. Other days, I’m speaking with security folks about the challenges they’re experiencing or sharing our research team’s newest findings at an event.
What excites you most about your role? How do you see yourself and your team driving innovation here?
I’d say a lot of the innovation at Censys is driven by asking – and trying to answer – questions at a global scale. On any given day, we might be finding out whether human rights workers are being targeted by ransomware, or monitoring how quickly Deadbolt infections are spreading, or trying to quantify the impact of a Zero Day worldwide. As a result, sometimes we’re confirming long-held assumptions in our industry, and other times, we’re exposing new information in real time.
And then there’s the work we do with individual organizations. I just got off a call where in less than 30 minutes, the security team went from asking “do we have any exposures out there?” to asking, “what do we do about these vulnerabilities we never knew existed?” With the knowledge they now have, that security team can create and implement new solutions to defend their organization, employees, and customers.
One last thing on the topic of innovation at Censys. More than anything else, people at Censys thrive on trying new ideas and adapting to change. Even as a young company, Censys has invested in programs like our unlimited book budget to ensure we continue to grow and learn. As both a people manager and a member of the team, it feels really good to be a part of a group that’s challenging themselves and learning every day.
Going forward, what innovation do you hope to see occur at Censys or within the broader cybersecurity industry?
With every new person that joins Censys, we gain an additional perspective and challenge our own assumptions, which ultimately drives our innovation forward. Last time I checked, the Censys executive team is 50% women, and the overall company is 36% women. But what I’m really excited to see is even more diversity in our team and in tech, so that we can truly represent the world we serve.
Grace Murphy | Integrations Engineer
What kinds of projects do you work on at Censys?
The projects I work on enable our users to integrate services that they are already accustomed to using with Censys. This could be something simple, like syncing tickets created within Censys to the user’s task management system of choice, such as Jira or ServiceNow. It could also be something as critical as providing the user visibility into their cloud infrastructure through our Censys Cloud Connectors.
What excites you most about your role? How do you see yourself and your team driving innovation here?
Every integration my team creates makes it easier for our users to be aware of their Internet presence. It has been really exciting to see how big of an impact the Cloud Connectors have made for so many of our customers. We have received so much positive feedback from customers who immediately found misconfigured or unknown cloud assets that they owned.
Empowering Women in Cybersecurity
Learn more about how women at Censys are driving innovation and hear about the experiences of our women executives in this Censys webinar, now on-demand. VP of People and Culture Jasmine Burns leads a roundtable discussion with Censys Chief Financial Officer Kathleen Thomas, Censys Chief Marketing Officer Dayna Rothman, and Censys Chief Revenue Officer Sarah Ashburn.
Stream Webinar
