Computer Security Expert
The daughter of software engineers, technology has always been a joy of Winter Snyder’s. However, she wasn’t very excited about it. It was intimidating, she said. There was no woman in sight. It felt like an exclusive club, only for men. It wasn’t until she started taking math and computer science classes in college — and got to problem solve — that she realized her passion. Yet as technology evolved, Snyder began to ask a question: what is protecting people’s data?
“There are so many devices out there that don’t have any of these mechanisms in place,” she explains. “Even for those that do have security mechanisms, not all of them are built to the kind of resilience that’s appropriate for the threats they’re up against.” Called to answer this question, Winter Snyder began developing threat-modeling. It is a process of protecting data that became part of Microsoft’s best practices. Keeping data out of the wrong hands would carry her into a job at Apple, where she ensured not even Apple could access people’s data.
Snyder plans to address this problem more widely with Thistle Technologies, which this week announced $2.5 million in seed funding from True Ventures. The company aims to make the update process easier and more reliable, especially so they don’t have to build the technology to do it themselves. Snyder calls the update mechanism the “core security feature.” With this, manufacturers can get back to a “known good state” if a device is somehow or some way compromised.
3 Things We Love About Window:
- She loves problem solving, like safety of someone’s data.
- Her advice for skills “Read everything and always be open to learning something new.”
- She’s a self described “geek girl”, whose mother taught her to program Basic when she was only 5 years old.