Natalia Carolina Sánchez Rocafort

I'm a principal cyber incident manager and team lead at Darktrace, where I manage the incident management team in the Americas. My team is called when clients experience confirmed cyber attacks and need assistance navigating those situations. I studied computer science at the University of Michigan's College of Engineering, and after graduating, I was looking for jobs that could leverage my technical background but weren't necessarily about programming all the time. A recruiter reached out to me via LinkedIn, and I started as a cybersecurity analyst. Within the analyst team, I participated in the security operations center triaging alerts, did threat research, and provided consultancy for clients on best practices. I mainly worked as a product expert and did consulting. I progressed to senior analyst consultant, tapping into what I did best, which was consultancy. I speak Spanish, so I got the great opportunity of working with strategic clients across Latin America, and I traveled to Chile and Colombia. From there, the opportunity arose to move over to the incident management team, and within a year, I was promoted to team lead. Throughout my career, mentorship has been incredibly important to me. Through my company's internal mentorship program, I was matched with our chief information security officer and one of our VPs for Legal and Associate General Counsel, and both mentored me for about six months. My direct supervisors have also been mentors, and the person who became my supervisor when I transitioned to incident management used to be my mentor.