7 Most Influential Women in Cybersecurity You Should Follow in 2026
On April 18, 2016, the US Department of Defense did something it had never done in its history.
It invited hackers in.
13 minutes after “Hack the Pentagon” launched, the first vulnerability report came in.
A week in security (March 2 – March 8)
On April 18, 2016, the US Department of Defense did something it had never done in its history.
It invited hackers in.
13 minutes after “Hack the Pentagon” launched, the first vulnerability report came in. By the time the program closed, 1,400 vetted researchers had found 138 legitimate security flaws in DoD’s public-facing web systems. Flaws that had survived every previous penetration test the Pentagon had conducted. The entire program cost $150,000. A traditional security audit covering the same ground would have cost over $1 million and found less.
The person who made that happen was Katie Moussouris. She had been pushing the idea since 2014, first at Microsoft, then at HackerOne. She understood something the Pentagon’s security apparatus had spent years resisting: that the people most likely to find your vulnerabilities are the same people you’ve been treating as the enemy.
That shift, from chasing threats to finding exposure before attackers do, is the idea running through every name on this list.
The cybersecurity industry is crowded with noise. Vendor pitches. Conference buzzwords. Products that promise everything and deliver compliance checkboxes. In that noise, a handful of voices cut through because they focus on what actually matters: understanding how systems break, how attackers think, and what’s genuinely at risk.
We built this list around one question: whose insights make us better at security? Not whose follower count is highest. Not who posts most often. Who actually moves the conversation forward on vulnerabilities, exposure, and how organizations get compromised?
These 7 most influential women shaped how the industry thinks about browser security, vulnerability disclosure, supply chain risk, privacy enforcement, and the gap between what security teams think they’re protecting and what’s actually exposed. Some built the frameworks that define how we coordinate vulnerabilities today. Others documented the client-side attacks that most security vendors ignored for years. A few are training the next generation of defenders to understand how web applications actually break.
If you’re responsible for securing web applications, managing third-party risk, or understanding your real attack surface, you’re already working in a world these voices helped define. Whether you realize it or not.
Following our feature on the most influential men in cybersecurity, we’re highlighting voices who have shaped the conversation around web security, supply chain risk, exposure management, and what it actually means to protect what’s in your browser.
7. Katie Paxton-Fear (@InsiderPhD)
Platform: X, YouTube, Website
Focus: API security, bug bounty, web application hacking, security education
Katie Paxton-Fear used to build APIs. Then she started breaking them. That shift turned into a PhD, a lecturing role at Manchester Metropolitan University, and a YouTube channel with over 100,000+ subscribers who tune in specifically to watch her explain how web applications get compromised.
Her research sits at the intersection of AI, machine learning, and security. Her practical work lives in bug bounty programs, API vulnerability hunting, and making offensive security techniques accessible to people who didn’t come from a traditional hacking background. She has spoken at CISA’s Cybersummit, presented at HackerOne events, and built a community of security learners who follow her because she teaches the way real attacks work, not the theoretical version.
She doesn’t just identify vulnerabilities. She documents them, explains them, and turns them into something developers can actually learn from.
Why her voice matters:
API security is where client-side risk lives in 2026. Third-party scripts, embedded trackers, payment processors, and analytics tools all communicate through APIs. Katie’s work on API vulnerability hunting shows exactly how attackers exploit the connections between web applications and the services they depend on. Her research proves that exposure doesn’t require a sophisticated nation-state actor. It requires a misconfigured endpoint and someone who knows where to look.
What makes her influential:
She represents what the next generation of security education looks like. Technical depth, genuine accessibility, and content that treats her audience as capable of understanding how attacks actually work. In a field crowded with surface-level awareness content, Katie goes deep. Her YouTube channel is one of the few places where a developer can watch someone break an API in real time and understand exactly what went wrong.
6. Parisa Tabriz (@laparisa)
Platform: X, LinkedIn
Focus: Chrome browser security, client-side attack surface, web security engineering
Parisa Tabriz joined Google as a security intern in 2006. She called herself the “Security Princess” because it seemed more interesting than her actual job title. Eighteen years later, she is the Vice President and General Manager of Google Chrome, responsible for the browser that over three billion people use to access the internet every day.
Under her leadership, Chrome became the first major browser to push HTTPS adoption at scale. Her team drove the migration from HTTP to HTTPS across the web, a change that fundamentally altered the attack surface for web users globally. She has overseen Google Project Zero, the elite vulnerability research team that discovers the browser bugs that client-side attacks depend on. She has testified before government committees, advised the US government on cybersecurity, and been named to Forbes’ 30 Under 30 in tech.
She also spends significant time mentoring young women entering security and STEM fields, because she remembers what the field looked like when she joined it.
Why her voice matters:
The browser is the attack surface. Every Magecart attack, every malicious third-party script injection, every client-side data breach happens inside the browser. Parisa leads the team responsible for securing the world’s most widely deployed attack surface. Her decisions about Chrome’s security architecture, about how the browser handles third-party code, about what constitutes a vulnerability worth patching, directly determine the environment that client-side attacks operate in. No one has more direct influence over the attack surface that client-side security exists to protect.
What makes her influential:
She turned browser security from a theoretical concern into an engineering discipline with real standards and measurable outcomes. The HTTPS-first web didn’t happen by accident. It happened because someone with her combination of technical authority and organizational influence made it a priority and pushed it across an entire industry. That’s the kind of impact that shapes what’s possible in web security for a generation.
Today we’re launching another major @googlechrome update that helps people browse smarter with #Gemini3!
Highlights include:🤹🏻 Side panel UX for better multitasking🍌 Nano Banana integration to transform images on the web✅ More Google app integrations to help you get things… pic.twitter.com/FihN9jXPhP
— Parisa Tabriz (@laparisa) January 28, 2026
5. Eva Galperin (@evacide)
Platform: X, LinkedIn
Focus: Privacy enforcement, third-party tracking, stalkerware research, digital rights
Eva Galperin was born in Latvia, grew up in California, and spent her early years as a Unix system administrator while studying political science and international relations. That combination turned out to be exactly what the Electronic Frontier Foundation needed.
She joined the EFF in 2007 and became its Director of Cybersecurity in 2017. Since then she has published malware research on nation-state spyware campaigns in Syria, Vietnam, Lebanon, and Kazakhstan. She documented how governments weaponize commercial software against journalists and activists. And in 2018 she turned her focus to stalkerware, the commercial spyware marketed to abusive partners and parents that had been ignored by the security industry for years.
Her campaign worked. She convinced Kaspersky to begin explicitly flagging stalkerware. She co-founded the Coalition Against Stalkerware. She changed how the antivirus industry categorizes and responds to a category of malware that directly enables domestic abuse. That’s not research. That’s real-world impact at scale.
Why her voice matters:
Privacy and third-party risk are inseparable. Every third-party script running on a website is a potential data exposure vector. Every tracker embedded in a web application is collecting behavioral data that ends up somewhere. Eva’s work on how malicious third parties exploit browser behavior and how tracking infrastructure gets weaponized against users connects directly to what organizations need to understand about their own web exposure. The tools attackers use against individuals are the same tools that compromise enterprise environments.
What makes her influential:
She holds the industry accountable in the same way Kevin Beaumont does, but from a civil liberties angle that forces a different kind of reckoning. She doesn’t just document attacks. She names the companies enabling them, pressures platforms to act, and builds coalitions that change industry standards. Her 169,000+ X followers listen because she has been right about threats the rest of the industry ignored until they couldn’t anymore.
4. Katie Moussouris (@k8em0)
Platform: X, LinkedIn
Focus: Vulnerability disclosure, supply chain coordination, bug bounty programs, security policy
In 2013, Katie Moussouris launched Microsoft’s first bug bounty program. Three years later, she helped create the US Department of Defense’s “Hack the Pentagon” initiative, the first government bug bounty program in American history. She did both while simultaneously co-authoring the ISO standards that now govern how vulnerability disclosure works globally: ISO 29147 for vulnerability disclosure and ISO 30111 for vulnerability handling processes.
She is the founder and CEO of Luta Security, a company that specializes in helping governments and large organizations build vulnerability coordination programs. She has served on the Cyber Safety Review Board, advised the US government across multiple committees, and conducted economic research on the vulnerability market as a visiting scholar at MIT Sloan and a Harvard Belfer affiliate.
Her 2021 congressional testimony on software supply chain security came at a moment when the industry was still processing SolarWinds. She had been warning about exactly these risks for years.
Why her voice matters:
Supply chain vulnerability coordination is one of the most underbuilt capabilities in enterprise security. Organizations know how to patch known CVEs. They don’t know how to coordinate across vendors, governments, and researchers when a vulnerability lives in a dependency three layers deep. Katie built the frameworks that define how that coordination is supposed to work. Her thinking on multiparty vulnerability coordination is directly applicable to every organization trying to understand risk in their third-party web supply chain.
What makes her influential:
Over 20 years of work that shaped not just practices but policy. She didn’t just build programs. She wrote the international standards that govern how vulnerability disclosure works everywhere. When enterprises set up their own vulnerability disclosure policies, they’re building on a framework Katie helped design. That kind of foundational influence doesn’t generate viral posts. It generates the infrastructure the industry runs on.
3. Keren Elazari (@k3r3n3)
Platform: X, LinkedIn, TED
Focus: Hacker culture, enterprise security strategy, ethical hacking, emerging threats
Keren Elazari grew up in Tel Aviv, got online at 11, and taught herself English through early internet communities and hacker forums. By the time she was drafted into the Israel Defense Forces, she already understood something most security professionals spend careers trying to articulate: hackers don’t break systems because they’re malicious. They break systems because systems are breakable.
That insight became the foundation of a career that has taken her from Israeli intelligence to Stanford, from Singularity University to the TED main stage. In 2014 she became the first Israeli woman to speak at TED. Her talk, “Hackers: The Internet’s Immune System,” has been translated into 30 languages and remains one of the most watched talks on cybersecurity ever recorded. She is a senior researcher at Tel Aviv University’s Interdisciplinary Cyber Research Center, a visiting faculty member at Reichman University, and the founder of BSidesTLV, Israel’s largest security community event, as well as Leading Cyber Ladies, a global professional network for women in cybersecurity.
For over 25 years she has worked with Fortune 500 companies, government agencies, and innovative startups as an independent strategic advisor on emerging security threats and technologies.
Why her voice matters:
Keren reframes how enterprises think about attackers. The old model treats hackers as a threat to be stopped. Her model treats them as a signal to be listened to. That distinction matters enormously for organizations trying to get ahead of exposure rather than react to breaches. Her work challenges security teams to stop asking ‘how do we block attackers?’ and start asking ‘what are attackers telling us about what’s exposed?’
What makes her influential:
She bridges the gap between technical security research and executive decision-making in a way very few people can. Her talks don’t just educate. They change how business leaders think about risk. When she speaks at a conference, CISOs walk away with a different mental model of the threat landscape. That kind of influence is rare, and it has made her one of the most sought-after voices in the industry for over two decades.
2. Caitlin Sarian (@CybersecGirl1)
Platform: X, LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube
Focus: Security education, privacy awareness, data protection, mass audience engagement
Caitlin Sarian spent nearly a decade in cybersecurity consulting before she noticed something that bothered her. The people who needed security knowledge most, everyday users, employees, small business owners, families, had almost no access to it. Everything was written for practitioners. Almost nothing was accessible to non-practitioners.
So she built it herself. Starting with TikTok, then Instagram, then LinkedIn, YouTube, and a newsletter now read by over 25,000 people, she created the largest cybersecurity education platform aimed at a general audience anywhere on the internet. Over 1.7 million followers. Over 30 million monthly impressions. Her content covers data protection, privacy enforcement, how to understand your digital footprint, and what organizations are actually doing with your data.
Her career before the platform was substantial. EY cybersecurity consultant, ISO 27001 lead implementer, GDPR specialist, TikTok’s Global Head of Cybersecurity Advocacy and Culture. She left that job in 2023 to run Cybersecurity Girl LLC full time. She has since been named Cybersecurity Woman of the Year for Influencer category, earned a spot on multiple 40 Under 40 lists, and spoken at GISEC, Black Hat, and conferences across three continents.
She was also named a Top 50 LinkedIn Cybersecurity Creator globally in 2024. She volunteers with NIST-NICE, leading a team focused on cybersecurity career discovery programs.
Why her voice matters:
Awareness is the first line of defense. Organizations spend millions on security tools and lose data because an employee clicked a phishing link or didn’t understand what they were consenting to when they installed a third-party widget. Caitlin closes that gap. Her audience isn’t security professionals. It’s the people security professionals are trying to protect. Reaching 1.7 million people with accurate, actionable security information is a genuine security contribution, not a soft one.
What makes her influential:
She proved that cybersecurity content could reach a mass audience without dumbing it down. Her background in consulting, compliance, and data protection means she understands the technical substance. Her talent is making that substance land with people who have no security background and no reason to care until something goes wrong. That combination is genuinely rare and genuinely valuable to the field.
1. Tanya Janca (@shehackspurple)
Platform: X, LinkedIn, YouTube, Website
Focus: Application security, secure coding, OWASP, DevSecOps, software supply chain
In 2019, a developer at a financial services company told Tanya Janca that her book had changed how his entire team wrote code. Not how they thought about security as a separate discipline. How they wrote code. That’s what Tanya has spent 28 years trying to do.
She is the bestselling author of “Alice and Bob Learn Application Security” and “Alice and Bob Learn Secure Coding,” two books that have become reference texts for development teams trying to build security into software rather than bolt it on after the fact. She is an OWASP Lifetime Distinguished Member, an OWASP Top Ten contributor, and the founder of We Hack Purple, WoSEC (Women of Security), and OWASP DevSlop. She has been named Hacker of the Year. She created the #CyberMentoringMonday movement on Twitter, connecting security mentors with professionals entering the field every single week.
Her career has included counter-terrorism work, leading security for the 52nd Canadian general election, and training thousands of developers and security professionals through her online academies at We Hack Purple and Semgrep Academy. She currently runs She Hacks Purple Consulting as CEO, working directly with organizations to build secure coding cultures from the ground up.
She is also an advisor to Smithy, Katilyst, and ICTC’s Policy Advisory Committee, and recently launched a petition for the Canadian government to adopt a national secure coding policy.
Why her voice matters:
Most client-side vulnerabilities aren’t sophisticated zero-days. They’re insecure code. Third-party scripts get injected, APIs get misconfigured, input validation fails, and attackers walk in through doors that should never have been left open. Tanya’s work attacks that problem at the source. She trains the developers writing the code that ends up in production environments, in web applications, in the dependencies that become supply chain risks. Her influence operates upstream of where most security tools focus. When developers write more secure code, the entire attack surface shrinks.
What makes her influential:
Over 28 years she has built something that most security educators haven’t: a genuine community. WoSEC has chapters globally. #CyberMentoringMonday runs every week without her having to push it. Her books are assigned in university programs. Her training has reached thousands of professionals who went on to build security programs of their own. She doesn’t just teach security. She builds the culture that makes security sustainable.
Why These Voices Changed Security
These women didn’t build large followings by posting about cybersecurity. They built large followings by being right about things that mattered, often before the rest of the industry caught up.
They pushed the browser to become more secure. They built the vulnerability disclosure frameworks enterprises run on. They documented the client-side attacks that were being ignored. They trained the developers whose code is the first and last line of defense in web applications. They reached audiences that security professionals never reached, and gave them the knowledge to protect themselves.
They proved that exposure doesn’t discriminate. A misconfigured third-party script, an uncoordinated vulnerability, a browser that handles untrusted code incorrectly, a developer who never learned what XSS actually means: these are the risks that actually compromise organizations. And these are exactly the risks these voices have spent their careers helping the industry understand and address.
The field is better because they’re in it. Not because of the awards or the follower counts, though those exist. Because they focused on what actually matters: understanding how systems break, how exposure accumulates, and what it genuinely takes to protect what organizations have built.
Every tool reacts to attacks. The work that moves the needle, the work these women do, is preventing the exposure that makes attacks possible in the first place.
The post 7 Most Influential Women in Cybersecurity You Should Follow in 2026 appeared first on Reflectiz.
*** This is a Security Bloggers Network syndicated blog from Cybersecurity Blog: News, Insights and Research – Reflectiz authored by Oran Frenkel. Read the original post at: https://www.reflectiz.com/blog/seven-most-influential-women-cyber/
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