‘White hat’ hacker Steph Jensen fighting back against cyber criminals
Steph Jensen is a key weapon in the war against cyber hackers stealing Australian data and costing us millions. This is how she catches criminals in the act. MULTIMEDIA SPECIAL
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Meet Steph Jensen – a key weapon in the war against cyber-hackers stealing Australian data and costing business millions.
An ethical hacker, Ms Jensen is a security consultant with security company CyberCX, and works for clients by hacking their systems to determine how to keep cyber-criminals out.
“Our day-to-day job is usually just breaking into (business) IT systems, their internal IT infrastructure,’’ she said.
There are a number of ethical hackers, also known as white hat hackers, employed in Australia, who spends their hours breaking into systems to find flaws and vulnerabilities. They call this “pen-testing’’, or penetration testing.
“Within the first few months…I was doing a pen-test and found another hacker had been there,’’ Ms Jensen said.
“They’d actually left a web page open that said this has been hacked, so it was really obvious but the client didn’t know about it.
“So it was an immediate call to them to let them know about it and they were very, very grateful.’’
When a malicious hacker is discovered in a client’s IT system, Ms Jensen hands over to another team at CyberCX, which moves in and disables them.
Sometimes, Ms Jensen can hack a client’s systems in an hour. On other occasions it can take days.
“I had a gig a little while ago that was a huge energy company and I only had three days to break in. That took me like two days to get in, and that was something I would assume would be secure but it really wasn’t.’’
She said it was a “huge adrenaline rush’’ to eventually find a flaw in a system which could have been exploited by a criminal, and let a company know about it before they were targeted.
“Sometimes you’ll instinctively know something is there and you’re banging your head against the wall trying to find it. It’s like a spidey sense, you know it’s there and you’ve just got to find it.’’
The white hat hacking community was tight-knit, and Ms Jensen said they all shared information and advice to help in the fight against cyber-criminals, and educate companies and individuals on how to protect themselves.
She said while some people reacted with concern when she hacked their systems, because they had wrongly believed their cybersecurity was better than it was, most people were “accepting and they’re excited they can fix it before the real bad guys actually get in.’”
She’s hacked “everything, anything you can possibly imagine. We do banks, telecommunication companies, energy companies, government departments, absolutely everything.’’
A Queenslander working in the ACT, Ms Jensen started her career six years ago doing digital forensics for a “certain Government department’’ then moved to a large consulting firm working on cyber threat intelligence and threat-hunting.
She had largely taught herself computing as a hobby while studying a biomedical degree and raising two small children.
Now aged 29 years, she is one of only a dozen female ethical hackers working in Australia, and encouraged women to consider it as a career.
“It’s such a good job in terms of flexibility as well in terms of kids and something you can do remotely.
“It’s the best job.’’