EDTECH: You founded the nonprofit organization Bits N’ Bytes Cybersecurity Education in 2016. What was your inspiration?
GURU: The motivation for it came when I went to a National Security Agency GenCyber camp. I was 14 at the time. It was a one-week immersion in all things cyber that really opened my eyes to the fact that cyber is not just the traditional mental image of a person in a basement wearing a hoodie, hacking away at a laptop. Cyber is also for people interested in psychology, design or products.
We talked a lot about how these vulnerabilities really root down at the fundamental level to human error. It could be that a human feels vulnerable, and they give away a password or address or bank information over the phone; likewise, on email or text messages, clicking the link when you’re scared. That part really alarmed me — 90 percent of cyberattacks boil down to human error.
I talked with my local community, and the verdict really was that a lot of the action taken in cybersecurity is reactive rather than proactive. I started by just pushing out five-minute animated videos for school districts across my community. That’s when I realized that students were growing up and weren’t really being taught what cybersecurity was until they explicitly chose to pursue that as a career path. And by that time, it might be too late.
Then I started doing it on more of a national scale. Along the way, I realized that I was one of the only women in the room having this conversation. I would find myself in rooms of congressmen or boardrooms of C-level folks talking about the importance of involving students in cybersecurity, but I was the only student in the room, and the only first-generation American female daughter of immigrants.
EDTECH: And that was the genesis of GirlCon?
GURU: I partnered with another friend of mine in school, and we came together and asked: What can we do? We had a bunch of ideas but eventually landed on what excited us most — bringing everyone in one room together. So, we started an annual conference that really engages with students.
Every year, about 900 students come to our conference to talk about bridging the gender gap, connect with each other, go to sessions and have their first foray into the professional tech world, greeted with open arms by this community of other young women who are just as excited as them.