Laura Faria: Empathy on the front lines
What does it take to lead through chaos and keep organizations safe in the digital age? This week, Amy sat down with Laura Faria, an incident commander at Cisco Talos Incident Response, to explore a career built on empathy, collaboration, and a passion for cybersecurity.
Laura opens up about her journey through various cybersecurity roles, her leap into incident response, and what it feels like to support customers during their toughest moments — including high-stakes situations impacting critical infrastructure.
Amy Ciminnisi: Laura, it’s great to have you on. You’re an incident commander, like Alex from last episode. When did your time at Talos start, and what did your journey here look like?
Laura Faria: My entire career, I’ve worked in many large cybersecurity vendors – endpoint vendors, firewall vendors, RAV vendors… So I’ve been in a lot of different roles, but they were mostly in sales. I was actually a Cisco employee prior to joining Talos IR. I’ve been at Cisco for a little over a year now, and Talos is one of the best places to work in Cisco, in my opinion. They have a really high reputation because everyone knows the quality of research that Talos provides our customers with.
I’d never been an incident commander before, so it was a really new position to me. But it was definitely something I was interested in, and the more I learned about what the role entailed, the more I was excited to pursue it.
AC: This is a very high-pressure role, and I’m sure you have to deal with a lot of chaos, a lot of moving parts. How do you stay focused and motivated to keep going when you’re tackling these really serious incidents for our clients?
LF: A common phrase in Talos IR is “It’s never a good day when an incident happens.” During very serious episodes, being there to help the customer feels really good, especially if you’re a people person, and especially if you’re empathetic and a lot with people’s emotions.
Recently, I had a very difficult incident where a large health care facility was seeing a lot of outages in different locations throughout the nation. Every time we saw a site outage, it was devastating because we knew what that meant. We actually had people’s lives in our hands. Although it’s a very difficult job, taking the time to look at the big picture and understand the importance of your job is really what keeps you going.
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