Said the CISO and VP of Trust at Reddit: "The internet felt like a space to explore. I wanted to protect and defend that. It felt like you needed to have a contingency plan for when things might go wrong.”

Said the chief security officer of Citizen Bank: “Being in the law enforcement and intelligence communities years ago has provided me with a very strong baseline into what we’re seeing the financial industry now.”

Said Code42's chief information security officer and CIO: “We don’t want to solely focus on stopping collaboration or blocking things, but more focus on securing the collaboration culture.”

Said Cybrary's chief impact officer: “It’s time to support one another by providing career support and access for all marginalized genders to obtain any position and title while working in cybersecurity and tech.”

Said Night Dragon's vice president of business development and strategic alliances of finally finding female colleagues: "At that point I realized how empowered I felt to have someone that resembled me in my world.”

"My goal is to shift the paradigm from plain-old public-private partnership to true operational collaboration; from information-sharing to information-enabling," the CISA director to SC Media. "This is in part the focus of the new Joint Cyber Defense Collaborative (JCDC) — bringing the power of the federal government with the power of industry to prevent incidents before they occur, and ensure a rapid and coordinated response when they do."

Said the vice president of global security and privacy risk management role at Reinsurance Group: "I’ve always organically wanted growth in my career to happen, so every two to three years, I would find myself in conversations with my boss about what’s next? What opportunities, what challenges, what can I help with?”

Many of the solutions Target developed — with 17 patents secured and more pending — comes down to "getting out of the way of these really smart people on my team," says the company's vice president of cybersecurity.

The co-founder of Menlo Security described the mantra simply: That “isolation is the only way you should connect to the internet.” And it's resonating: Nine out of the 10 largest banks are Menlo customers. "Wells Fargo is the holdout.”

Said the chief technology officer and founding partner of advisory firm SecurityCurve: "I always like to keep a balance. I think it's really easy to just start looking through one lens — forget what else is out there.”