IT Blog

Software is in Masha Sedova’s blood. Her grandmother was in the first graduating class of programmers in the Soviet Union, in the 1950s; she taught Sedova’s father to code, and he taught Masha, who moved to the U.S. at age 4. Sedova saw cybersecurity “as a large cat and mouse game,” she says, “a problem of people attacking people with technology in the middle.” The company she founded in January 2017, Berkeley, CA-based Elevate Security, helps large-scale enterprises—including Airbnb, Equifax, and a growing number of customers in pharma and biotech— secure what she calls their “human attack surface” against cyber attacks. While more than 90% of the cybersecurity industry focuses on technological solutions, “85% of cybersecurity breaches in the last year were due to the human element.” COVID has amplified the challenges, says Sedova: “Everyone’s logging into critical systems from home in pajamas, and hackers are exploiting the chaos of the pandemic to…