Stacey Halota is the Vice President for Information Security and Privacy at Graham Holdings Company. Ms. Halota has more than 20 years of experience in the IT, security and privacy fields. Before joining The Washington Post Company in 2003, she served as the federal government and southeast region leader of Guardent Consulting Services (now part of Verisign), where she helped transform Guardent from a regional decentralized model into a national information security consulting organization recognized by Computerworld as a top 100 company to watch among IT companies. Prior to Guardent, she worked at PricewaterhouseCoopers in the Technology Risk Services consulting practice where she helped grow the team serving the mid-Atlantic market and federal government from two consultants with no client base or revenue to 46 consultants and $9.3M in annual revenue in three years. She talks to the Young Professionals about her volunteer work and staying positive in the face of change.
Ms. Halota describes herself as a very optimistic and positive person, saying, “there is so much to be grateful here.” She cites an incident recently when she was in a taxi and the driver was from Afghanistan. He said, when you live in the U.S., you’ve hit the lottery. The sentiment rung true for Ms. Halota, as it does for us here on the Young Professionals committee.
Although Ms. Halota enjoys her work – and, as described above, is extremely successful at it—if she completely changed courses today, she would choose to be more active in missionary and volunteer work, expanding the work that she already does. One of her passions is The Mustard Seed Project (MSP), a non-profit which provides acts of mercy and acts of mission in east and central Africa. Ms. Halota is particularly active in Rwanda, leading mission trips there and ultimately joining the Board of Directors in 2013.
She has traveled extensively with the MSP, describing it as a land of 1,000 hills and lakes with unbelievable beauty. Ms. Halota also travels around as a consultant and as a speaker. For example, She was the CISO Spotlight featured speaker at last year’s Black Hat conference and spoke at the inaugural Privacy and Security Summit in October as well. Above and beyond these prestigious engagements, she reveres the Grand Canyon as an inspirational spot that she would recommend to any traveler.
Asked about which of her special projects or undertakings she is most proud of, Ms. Halota cited her work with the International Consortium of Minority Cyber Professionals (ICMCP). Launched in 2014 to bridge the cyber divide that results from the ongoing underrepresentation of minorities in the fast-growing field of cyber security, they will sponsor their first-ever National Conference of Minority Cybersecurity Professionals in March 2016. Once again, Ms. Halota will be a featured speaker.
Ms. Halota was named Secure Computing Magazine’s 2009 Chief Security Officer of the Year and was also named 2009 Mid-Atlantic Information Security Executive of the Year (Commercial Category) by the Executive Alliance. She has been featured in Secure Computing Magazine and is well-known around DC and in the cyber community generally. We were happy to be granted the gift of some of her time and— albeit unnecessarily—wish her luck in her upcoming appearances. We’ll be following you!
