You receive an email from a familiar sender. It looks legitimate, but when you hover over the link, something doesn’t quite line up. That moment of pause is where many cyber threats are either stopped or allowed through.

Understanding how and why those moments matter has become the focus of Nicole Bendrich (BScE’15, D-TME’15, MScE’20). As director of product at alumni-founded Beauceron Security, she helps organizations use data to understand cyber threats better and stay ahead of them. Her work focuses on the role people play in security systems and why they are more important than many assume.

“I see us as a human and behaviour change company. What I love about Beauceron, is that we’re not thinking about humans as the weakest link. We’re not saying humans are the problem. We’re saying humans are the solution. Humans are a company’s strongest link, and the reason that they’re so important is that they’re going to be able to determine if there’s something wrong more effectively than technology.”

That perspective shapes how the company approaches cybersecurity. While Beauceron’s software suite includes phishing emails to train users, it also relies on those same users to flag suspicious messages. Nicole and her team created an AI tool that analyzes email data to sharpen the company’s awareness about the latest threats and build specific protections to combat them. The automation has increased the email report rate by over 50 per cent.

Nicole’s path into this role began during the uncertainty of 2020. Faced with a fluid job market, she opened her mind to a role outside of her field, in a company where she thought she would grow. “My philosophy was, well, I might as well go and learn something new,” she recalls of her first role in sales at Beauceron Security. “I got my foot in the door and learned a ton.”  

She also learned that the company could use her skills as a data analyst. So, she pitched her idea to the CEO, though not without trepidation. “I will say I was terrified. I’d never really talked to a CEO before. I don’t know if people would take me seriously, but I had that conversation, and I was like, ‘I think that I can help here.’” That led to her becoming Beauceron’s first data scientist. Today, she leads product strategy and a cross-functional team that spans ML/data, instructional design, and animation.

Keeping humans at the centre of tech

For Nicole, engaging with humans is one of the best ways to fight on the front lines of cybersecurity. “I could give advice this week and say, ‘this is what deep fakes look like,’ and next week, my advice needs to be completely different. But you and I, in our own organizations, we know who we’re frequently talking to, and we will know if something feels out of the ordinary.” She says that most people don’t realize that a phishing message they’ve received has also gone to many inboxes, so encouraging active reporting means organizations get a bigger picture of the attack and can take action to enact fixes and alerts.

As cyber threats become more sophisticated, especially with advances in AI, the challenge is growing. “Cyber threats, they continue to change and evolve. Especially with AI, I can’t say that they’re not getting trickier.” She notes that while it used to take months or years for hackers to find system vulnerabilities, today’s AI takes a day. “That just means we need to be a lot more mindful and quality-focused in how we are approaching technology, both building it and when it comes to us, interacting with that world.”

To explain, Nicole shares an analogy that suggests users need to think of their inboxes like a hotel lobby. “Where different people come in and out. Not everybody stays at the hotel. Not everybody should be at the hotel. Some people can be in the lobby with different intentions.” With that in mind, she says the key is to be more alert. “I don’t think that we need to be scared of it, but we just have to understand what is possible.” In thinking about artificial intelligence, she is even more buoyant about the possibilities. “I can’t say we’re 50 per cent faster or anything like that. But even those small, incremental gains that we’re seeing right now are still freeing us up to learn more in other areas. I’m excited about the augmentation of productivity and skills.” At the same time, she’s concerned that the tech field is moving so quickly that people aren’t making time for important conversations about its progress.

“I think what scares me the most when it comes to AI is outsourcing our thoughts and not taking the time for critical thought. That’s where I’m so happy that as part of my engineering program, we had to take a course in ethics.” Not surprisingly, she’s an advocate for current programs to include at least a minimum standard of ethics training.

She’s also careful to incorporate that mindfulness into her own work with data. “How can we, as people who are working with data, flag inconsistencies or biases in the data, so that we’re able to build something that is very clear on its limitations? Or how can we create something that is more helpful and holistic to the population?”

Building the toolkit

Nicole’s interest in this field developed through her academic path. She studied electrical engineering and took electives in ethics and psychology, which she credits with adding much-needed context to her data skills. “Studying engineering, you need to make sure that anything that you build is going to do good for society. Being able to layer in some of those psychology pieces so that I could become more familiar with different biases was a really nice complement, that layered really well into my master’s, as well.”

She went on to complete a research- based master’s degree and wrote a thesis, supervised by Erik Scheme (BScE’03, MScE’05, PhD’13), that looked at electroencephalogram (EEG) data to try and understand people’s emotional reactions by interpreting facial expressions as clues to feelings. “That really taught me a lot when it comes to the importance of not just getting the numbers but being really mindful of conclusions that you’re coming up with.”

Along the way, she found an interest in entrepreneurship and earned a diploma in technology management and entrepreneurship. She spent a summer on exchange at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore and, in her final year of the bachelor’s program, co-founded a startup called Tempo, a workout app that integrates the intensity of a user’s music with the intensity of their workout using biomedical sensors.

From biomedical sensors to cybersecurity, the thread through Nicole’s career has been the same: start with the data, build it around people.