After two decades in federal cybersecurity, Cynthia Kaiser hits the private sector

Cynthia Kaiser was just back from South Korea, where she’d been on a Fulbright scholarship, in 2005 when she decided to devote the next two decades of her life to working for the FBI.

She was jetlagged when she interviewed with the agency. It felt like the middle of the night, she told IT Brew, and she bowed at her interview.

Today, Kaiser works at software development company Halcyon as ransomware research center SVP. But her path to cybersecurity wasn’t assured when she joined the FBI—once she became an agent, her focus was analysis.

“I didn’t start my career doing cyber work,” Kaiser said. “It was much more focused internationally.”

Moving up. A decade later, after a stint as the President’s Daily Brief (PDB) briefer in the White House, Kaiser became interested in a government career in cybersecurity. After a year of delivering sensitive intelligence to the Oval Office, where she had a front-row seat to the dangers presented by attackers, she was ready to apply her knowledge of cyber defense on returning to the FBI.

“I remember seeing the fear in some of the most powerful people in the world’s eyes about what people might be doing on a keyboard thousands of miles away,” Kaiser said. “And I knew, when I came back to the FBI, there was nothing else I wanted to do—I felt it in my bones that countering cyber threats is really the national security challenge of our lifetime.”

For the next eight years, Kaiser worked with the FBI’s Cyber Division, first as an assistant section chief, then as section chief, and finally, for her last two and a half years in public service, deputy assistant director.

Parallel move. She made the move to the private sector in June 2025. After years of working in the government and seeing how the public sector managed threats, Kaiser said she was ready to try something new, in part so she could have a full breadth of security experience.

Understanding both sides of security is important to Kaiser, who said she wants to “stay in the fight and stay in the mission against threat actors.”

“I focused in on the industry where I still felt like I could make a difference,” Kaiser said. “It was just with a different lens, it was that industry lens.”

When it comes to threats, private cybersecurity has a smaller but deeper scope, Kaiser found. As a ransomware-focused expert, she has been able to take advantage of the industry’s advancements faster than at the FBI. Integration of AI and other technologies moves more quickly in the private sector.

“When you’re talking about being able to integrate new technologies and think about new ways of doing things, it’s so much faster at Halcyon, and in the private sector overall,” Kaiser said.