Pancakes & Machetes: A Dialogue with Lesley Carhart

There are few people, if any, who have given more of themselves to the cybersecurity community than Lesley Carhart. Our conversation with Lesley came immediately after the 3rd annual PancakesCon, a free conference she conceived with a unique “20 on, 20 off” format that celebrates who we are outside of work as much as what we accomplish as security professionals. In the fashion of a person who is both an incident response expert and a community organizer, the conference was pulled together in a frantic 11 days after Omicron wreaked havoc on Winter conference schedules and there was a gap Lesley saw that needed to be filled.Having joined the Airforce Reserves just before 9/11 with the intent to become an airplane mechanic, Lesley’s career has been spent balancing military service along with “the usual” pressures of working in cybersecurity. She explains how she juggled her civilian and military life for 20 years up until her recent retirement as an Airforce Master Sergeant. Lesley recaps her 2 decades of service while laying out the good, the bad and the misconceptions for any who would follow in her footsteps.Alongside her cybersecurity day job and military service, Lesley also actively practices and teaches martial arts to children. We explore what motivates her passion for serving those around her, focusing on her early difficulties breaking into the cybersecurity industry in spite of having had her first programming job at the age of 15. Lesley, Jack and Dave conclude with a hopeful dialogue on what more we have to do to create a truly diverse and supportive cybersecurity community– and how it might be the key to finally resolving the current staffing and burnout crisis.BioLesley Carhart is a Principal Industrial Incident Responder at the industrial cybersecurity company Dragos, Inc. She has spent more than a decade of her 20+ year IT career specializing in information security, with a heavy focus on response to nation-state adversary attacks. She is recognized as a subject matter expert in the field of cybersecurity incident response and digital forensics.Prior to joining Dragos, she was the incident response team lead at Motorola Solutions. Her focus at Dragos is developing forensics and incident response tools and processes for uncharted areas of industrial systems. She is also a certified instructor and curriculum developer for the Dragos “Assessing, Hunting, and Monitoring Industrial Control System Networks” course.She has received recognition such as DEF CON Hacker of the Year, a “Top Woman in Cybersecurity” from CyberScoop,“Power Player” from SC Magazine, and is a 2021 SANS Difference Makers award nominee.In her free time, Lesley co-organizes resumé and interview clinics at several cybersecurity conferences, blogs and tweets prolifically about infosec, has served for 20 years in the USAF Reserves, and is a youth martial arts instructor.