In this video, you will learn to describe the foundations of critical thinking, and why it is an essential skill for any career in cybersecurity. So a little bit of background, my name is Kristin Dahl. I'm intelligence Developer with X-Force IRIS. I've been with IBM for about nine months now, and prior to that, I was a researcher at MIT Lincoln Laboratories. This talk, Beyond Technology, this was a talk that I put together a few months back for a conference here in Boston called Day of Security. It's a conference geared toward women in cybersecurity, and this is geared towards women who are early on in their career. What I wanted to do was highlight critical thinking as an important part of cybersecurity. So often when we think of cybersecurity, our immediate thought is it's very technical field. We think automatic, our thoughts automatically with the operating systems, networking, very technical things. I think that our minds are [inaudible] to the problems. If they critically through problems, this is often overlooked and so that's what I'm trying to present with this talk. So what is critical thinking? It's one of those things that doesn't have a hard and fast definition. Everybody's got their own definition of what is critical thinking. I went through a dictionary search, and I found a few definition, and then I made up my own that I liked, that I put at the bottom. So for the purposes of this discussion, critical thinking is controlled, purposeful thinking directed toward a goal. It's different than daydreaming. It's different than thinking about what you had for breakfast or your to-do list. It's very controlled purposeful thinking. Again, my goal with this presentation is to present the basic foundations of critical thinking, and also to highlight this as an essential skill for any career in cybersecurity domain. Whether you're in finance, whether you're an HR, whether you're [inaudible] , you have a technical role. I think you'll take something away from this, and you still will apply regardless of your role or the project that you're on. So why in cybersecurity? Why am I focusing on critical thinking, specifically, inside of cybersecurity? Beside the fact that I work in cybersecurity, there's a number of characteristics of the domain that I think lend itself to this kind of discussion. One is that, it's a constantly changing environment. It's very fast-paced. We've got different technology that's changing every day. There's multiple stakeholders, whether that comes from a variety of backgrounds, whether that's economic, legal, HR, and we also got an adversary. There's an adversary presence in there, so it's very multifaceted. It's a new field. It's a relatively new field, and we don't have all the answers. We don't have cyber figure it out, and so critical thinking skills force us to think, and act in situations where there are no clear answers, and where there are no specific procedures in place. Again, this is part art, part science. There's no defined way to do this. It's subjective. It's impossible to measure. But I think it's so important that we talk about it, and have these discussions. One other point I like to bring up a lot is that when you live in this age of Google it, where often our immediate reaction when we're faced with a problem is to use Google, to go enter or question in your search box, then the Internet tells us the answer. That's different from the situation in which we had to rely on books to libraries and slower research methods to answer our questions. Information was not as widely available. So this wealth of information isn't always good. More data doesn't [inaudible] knowledge, and that can quickly start to overwhelm our reasoning abilities. Because of this, critical thinking is more important now than ever. The ability to discern important information from, that feeds information and make an educated intelligent decision.