Meet Cat Murdock

Security Consultant

Cat is here to dispell myths that there is any one specific way to begin a technical career. She believes sincerely if you like pattern recognition, and you’re decent at research, there is no technical barrier you can’t climb with enough time. Time tends to be the biggest barrier to her learning all the things, but here she is, trying anyway.

When Cat was in high school, she wanted a career in science and engineering. She signed up for all the AP and honors classes as early as she could, and she wound up taking both Honors Chemistry and, later, Advanced Placement (AP) Chemistry with the same teacher. She went to a small high school, so there wasn’t a huge amount you could do to avoid teachers if you wanted to maximize certain classes. After Honors Chem, little 14yo Cat had a suspision that she wasn’t the teacher’s favorite student but couldn’t figure out why. She decided that it was just a feeling and there wasn’t a real reason to not take AP Chem with the teacher, plus if she wanted to take all of the AP science classes, she had to. So there she went.

While it’s not possible to know what the teacher’s issues were, sometime during AP Chem the teacher told Cat multiple times that girls just weren’t always as good at chemistry as the boys were, so maybe Cat should reconsider her career goals. As a teenager, this was a pretty formative experience. While Cat’s grades were stellar, and she got into a strong college, her idea that she belonged in the science, technology, math, and engineering world was rattled, but computers, logical analysis, and technology continued to appeal to Cat.

She got her degree from Duke in Public Policy, with a focus on Technology Policy. While her degree was a liberal arts degree, she chose it because it had tangible skills as takeaways, like technical writing, multiple statistics requirements, and access to internships. It wasn’t long before Cat’s confidence and enthusiasm in STEM careers was reinvigorated. Halfway through college, the economy tanked which further solidified Cat’s internal commitment to finding a career that was necessary as well as interesting. After college, Cat was a corps member with Teach for America in the Mississippi Delta region. She taught math and science wich allowed her to begin sharing her enthusiasm for STEM topics as well as set future adults up for success in STEM careers. Once her teaching commitment was up, she began her tech consulting career.

After years consulting on e-commerce strategy, Cat moved into security policy consulting and quickly realized there was exciting opportunity in learning how to actually break all of the theoretical conditions she discussed, so she committed to becoming an offensive security professional, and assumed she had strong enough soft skills to pivot into the offensive technology space by way of social engineering.

Somehow, through a few years of very regular plot twists, Cat was able to convince a well known social engineer to give her a job and quickly tried to capitalize on every learning opportunity. The world of security opened up before her, and Cat realized that social engineering would always be helpful, but was only the smallest tip of a very interesting iceburg. Cat left the social engineering focused company to increase her technical acumen and hasn’t looked back. With great friends and mentors like Joaquim, Cat excitedly embraces learning new technologies and hobbies on the regular. She currently does penetration testing and red teaming full time, while embracing both industry and random curiosities.

Things i am currently working on…

• Twitter
• GitHub