Breaking The Glass Ceiling: Know More About Indo-American CISO Of Twitter Rinki Sethi

Great positions come with great power responsibilities. In September 2020, Rinki Sethi was in news for her appointment as the new Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) at Twitter. Before her stint with the micro-blogging site, she had worked with Rubrik and Palo Alto Networks among others. She joined Twitter at a time when they were dealing with the Bitcoin scam and the hacking mechanisms that led people to question Twitter's security policy.

Recently in a tweet, she spoke about the importance of mental health:

Everything is charged and heavy in 2021. It is so important to breathe and think before reacting. We need to be kind to one another now more than ever. #mentalhealth #kindness 🙏🏽❤️

— Rinki Sethi (@rinkisethi) January 14, 2021

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Here Are Ten Things To Know About Rinki Sethi's Inspiring Journey

1. Sethi is an Indo-American who began her career in cybersecurity accidentally and went on to carve out a name for herself.
2. She has worked in various multinational companies like IBM, Palo Alto Networks, eBay, Walmart.com, Pacific Gas and Electric and Rubrik.
3. In IBM, Sethi worked as an information security executive. She worked as a Vice President in the Information Security department at Palo Alto Networks Inc.
4. Sethi made a name for herself in the cybersecurity domain which once she herself termed as a 'boy's club' which is still dominated by men. According to a 2017 survey, women still account for only 24 percent of the ICT workforce, a trend that’s steady for at least a decade ahead.
5. Rinki was exposed at an early age to the IT world by her father through programming. Her father was a mechanical engineer who learned to program in Java.
6. Initially, Sethi was inclined towards delving into the field of law but her father convinced her to get a degree in something at which she is good.
7. Sethi took a cryptography course while pursuing her computer science engineering at the Univerity of California at Davis. In the computer science course, she was the only woman in the class. She graduated in 2004 and went on to do a job as an information protection staffer.
8. The leading lady of Twitter joined the platform amidst the micro-blogging site's tough times of dealing with the Bitcoin scam and the hacking mechanisms that led people to question Twitter's security policy.
9. In an interview with Intelligent CISO, she told the media house about the one thing she would have changed if she can travel back. Here is her transition idea, "I wish I had taken bigger risks earlier in my career. As one of the few women in security, back when I had started, I felt like I had to nail everything the first time and I didn’t want to take big chances due to the fear of failing. Now, when I look back at my career, I realise the times I have grown and learned the most are when I have made mistakes and taken big risks."
10. She as a leader has also worked towards bringing equality around her in whatever capacity she could. She pumped and derived the partnership between Palo Alto Networks and the Girl Scouts of the USA to develop the first set of national cybersecurity badges for grades K-12 which brought gender equality in the IT sector at the ground level.

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