Rising Star Alma Ritter Cole

31 U.S. Customs and Border Protection, Homeland Security DepartmentLead, Cyber Security and Focused Operations, DHS Security Operations Center (SOC) : Leading the response to the Adobe Reader JBIG2 vulnerability. Led a team that identified and tracked multiple spear-phishing e-mail messages that attempted to exploit this vulnerability, and tackled other so-called zero-day security threats — those flaws for which no fixes are available. Patricia Butera, who entrusted me with significant responsibilities and provided me with unique opportunities that allowed me to rise to the occasion. She has also taught me the importance of having a clear vision and communicating that vision to internal and external stakeholders. By focusing on interagency information sharing about cyber threats that affect DHS and other federal agencies, the mean time to detect and remediate incidents has been significantly reduced, decreasing exposure to DHS information. These efforts have greatly enhanced the situational awareness for DHS executive management and have significantly improved its cybersecurity posture.Collaborated with component SOCs and the U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team to ensure DHS systems were protected from the Conficker worm, which was scheduled to alter its command and control technique on April 1. Because of this proactive action, DHS only observed one Conficker infection for every 100,000 DHS systems. Similar proactive efforts were undertaken to effectively protect DHS against Agent.BTZ threats. SWAT team.