[Powerofmene]

Would the breach appear worse if her degree was in CS or not? Seems the HN community is trying to correlate her degree to the breach and this is virtually impossible. Her MFA did not cause the breach nor is their an identifiable correlation.

[phailhaus]

Optics. Equifax has pretty clearly demonstrated that it does not care at all about security. There was the breach, then the news that their "random PINs" were just timestamps, then there was the admin/admin credentials for an employee portal. It's a pretty bad look.

[floatingatoll]

This is Hacker News, though. Is it news that the CSO has a degree in Music? No, not without further investigation, which didn't occur prior to the bait-titled link to her LinkedIn profile.

That's my only point here. Her degree is irrelevant to the point of uselessness for determining whether she's qualified, and whether fault for this incident lies with her judgement calls, or with others.

Maybe we'll find out that she's been writing internal memos for years about the security catastrophes and they've been willfully ignored by the CEO and the Board of Directors. Hell, she has an MFA in Music, so she there's a non-zero chance she wrote them a song about how they'll all be burned at the stake someday if they don't listen to her. This is no less likely an outcome.

We literally have no information to accompany the bare facts of her profile. Hacker News is not Hacker "link to a list of facts with a clickbait, personal-attack title and hope that someone else investigates if they're newsworthy" News. There is no news here without further investigation, and no one has done that in this thread. This should never have been posted as-is.

EDIT: If you were doing a post-mortem of an incident and a manager came in and said "Well, obviously that incident occurred, we let the guy with a Music degree do production work", they'll probably end up being fired under a cloud of HR violations, because they likely have a habit of invoking personal attributes in an inappropriate context. Don't be That Guy. Personal attributes - and optics - are not relevant to a post-mortem. Work behaviors, intentions, statements, and judgements are.

[thisisdallas]

>This is Hacker News, though. Is it news that the CSO has a degree in Music? No, not without further investigation, which didn't occur prior to the bait-titled link to her LinkedIn profile.

First off, the title was literally a fact. There was no opinion or "click bait" added to the title.

Second, yes this is absolutely news. The Chief Security Officer of a company who has very private details of tens of millions of US citizens received two degrees in a music field. Some might find it news because it's, in my opinion, quite interesting she was able to go from studying music to becoming the CSO of a major and very important company. Some people might find it to be news because it most certainly could cause questions of her ability when looking at this fact and other Equifax security related facts.

I'm quite confused as to why you are so offended by this submission. It's not uncommon from C level executives of major businesses to have received degrees in the area they are working. The fact that computer/network security is an extremely focused field and the CSO of an extremely important company has two degrees in music instead of CS or a related field is quite interesting.