Our Vision
Enabling gender equality through peer to peer support
We are a group of independent security researchers, and computer science researchers who believe that our field needs more diversity. We had witnessed how women around the world are challenged by numerous obstacles when attempting to join the technology field. From cultural biases through discrimination to lack of financial support, women have a lower participation in our community. We believe that we may encourage more women to enter and stay in this field.
The Independent Women in Tech Fund aims to help women attend security conferences by providing assistance with entry ticket and possible travel support.
Attending information security conferences is not only about getting access to talks and staying up to date with top notch research. The most important thing about these events is the community and the networking opportunities. To feel part of the area.
For most women, the opportunity to attend conferences, talk to peers, see other women in the field, ask for advices and feel that they are supported makes a difference in their careers. Such support may help decide their future. We want to help with that.
Women in Business, TechEd, 2014.
Who we are
From peers, to peers
Salvador Mendoza
@Netxing
Salvador Mendoza is a security researcher focusing in tokenization processes, magnetic stripe information and embedded prototypes. He has presented on tokenization flaws and payment methods at Black Hat USA, DEF CON 24/25, DerbyCon, Ekoparty, BugCON, 8.8, and Troopers 17/18. Salvador designed different tools to pentest magnetic stripe information and tokenization processes. In his designed toolset includes MagSpoofPI, JamSpay, TokenGet, SamyKam and lately BlueSpoof.
Ingrid Christensen
@ingridachr
Ingrid is a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Argentina, wife and mother of two little boys. Her research focused in Group Recommendation Systems and her contributions were published in several journals.
She has been involved in several national and international AI-related research projects both in Latin America and Europe as a fellow researcher of The National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET), Argentina.
Her current line of research focuses in Machine Learning and Deep Neural Networks.
Her values and commitment to help others continuously drive Ingrid to harness the power of AI to help solve social challenges.
Sebastian Garcia
@eldracote
Sebastian is a malware researcher and security teacher. He did his PhD on the detection of botnets/malware by analyzing their network traffic and creating behavioral models of their actions. He likes to analyze network patterns with machine learning tools, specially on malware and botnet traffic. As a researcher in the ATG group of Czech Technical University in Prague, he believes that free software and machine learning tools can help better protect users from abuse of their digital rights. He has been teaching in several countries and Universities and working on penetration testing for both corporations and governments. As a co-founder of the MatesLab hackspace he is a free software advocate that worked on honeypots, malware detection, distributed scanning (dnmap) keystroke dynamics, bluetooth analysis, privacy protection, intruder detection, robotics and biohacking.
In the CTU University he is managing the Stratosphere IPS project, where they are developing a free-software behavioral-based IPS.
Veronica Valeros
@verovaleros
Veronica is a hacker and researcher from Argentina.Her research has a strong focus on helping people and involves different areas from wireless and bluetooth privacy issues to malware, botnets and intrusion analysis.
She has presented her research on international conferences such as BlackHat, EkoParty, Botconf and others. She is the co-founder of the MatesLab hackerspace based in Argentina.
From 2013 to early 2018 she worked in the Cognitive Threat Analytics team (Cisco Systems) where she specialised on malware network traffic analysis and threats’ categorisation at big scale. She led a threat research team, leading simultaneous research projects and mentoring young people.
Since April 2018, she joined the Czech Technical University in Prague. She is leading the Civilsphere project, which aims to help NGOs from targeted attacks and cyber threats that may threaten their activities.
In her spare time she is studying and researching remote access trojans in a project called 'A Study of RATs'.