Jennifer Swann had a part-time job in college as a Teller for the Bank of America and while in this role, her eyes were opened to the realities of data protection.

“It taught me about sensitivity of data and information,” Swann reflects. “Obviously, being a bank teller, you're dealing with accounts, and every account is sensitive.”

While this part-time role introduced Swann to the world of information security, it wasn’t until she joined PNC as an Infrastructure Engineer that she gained her first true foothold into the world of security.

“It gave me the foundation of working in security, even though I wasn’t in a traditional SOC,” Swann says.

After almost three years in that role, Swann joined the Northrop Grumman Corporation as a Cyber Intelligence Analyst.

“There, I really went into the cybersecurity realm — like focused only on cybersecurity — and started as a SOC analyst. And from there, I saw I had a strong passion for incident response,” Swann recalls. “In the SOC, you’re the first to say, ‘Hey, we see something weird.’ But incident responders get to go and act. And that that was something I was really interested in.”

Swann began learning from team members involved in incident response, then took a position as an Incident Response Analyst at Under Armour, where she got to engage in incident response fully.

“I really, really enjoyed it,” Swann remarks.

Eventually, Swann made her way to Bloomberg News as the Senior Manager of Threat Response before shifting to Bloomberg Industry Group as the Director of Information Security. Here, Swann was given the opportunity to branch out beyond incident response.

“I was director of this program that was not just incident response, but product security, vulnerability management, cloud infrastructure security, and more,” Swann explains. “We had a small team at the time, but we all learned together, and it was impactful for me to help grow the team. We started off with a small team, and then we eventually quadrupled it. It was a big, big win for me.”

From there, Swann was promoted to Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) of Bloomberg Industry Group, which is the role she has today. As her career continues to grow, Swann considers her greatest success so far to be the teams she’s supported along the way.

“Getting to go into an organization and build teams — I think that's probably my biggest success story so far,” she says. “I really love building teams.”

In a world with constantly evolving cyber threats, Swann highlights the challenges of knowing where to focus.

“Trying to understand and prioritize the various issues that cybersecurity teams face is the biggest challenge I see right now,” Swann states. “Sometimes I feel like you can get bogged down by the newest thing, and you find yourself chasing after it. Prioritizing is hard. So is making sure we’re focused on the most critical thing.”

To stay ahead of these challenges, Swann recommends one thing: curiosity.

“Always have a curious mind. Always try to learn. Just feed your mind,” Swann insists. “I think that goes a long way, especially in cybersecurity.”