Filigran ebook highlights varied paths into cyber threat intelligence

Filigran has released an ebook, Women in CTI, featuring 16 practitioners discussing how they entered cyber threat intelligence and what has kept them in the field, according to primary material published by the open-source cybersecurity company.

The company’s ebook page says the contributors came from backgrounds including intelligence, the military, political science, marketing, game development, engineering, recruitment, theatre and a decade at home raising children. Filigran says the interviews cover career paths, trust-building, keeping pace with uncertainty, the role of AI and investigations that remained significant to the participants.

In a Filigran blog post dated September 24, 2026, Jason Harris, the company’s senior community experience manager, described the ebook as based on interviews with 16 women working across threat intelligence. The post says almost none followed a conventional path into CTI, challenging a common view that the role typically begins with a computer science degree, security operations centre experience and then a move into intelligence.

The blog post says the stories point to three recurring qualities: comfort with uncertainty, strong communication and curiosity that appeared before any formal CTI title. It also says several contributors were trusted with responsibility before their résumés had caught up, a point Filigran framed as relevant to hiring managers.

Filigran’s primary ebook material lists nine chapters, including sections titled Curiosity Is the Only Prerequisite, Someone Took a Chance on Me, The Human in the Loop and Lifting As We Climb. The company says the AI-focused chapter examines decisions about what work should be handed to AI, describing that boundary as a judgement call rather than a setting.

The ebook page includes named contributors from organisations including Canva, Richemont, Surefire Cyber, Cyber Threat Intelligence Network, OpenCTI and Filigran. It attributes comments to several practitioners, including Canva head of threat intelligence and red team Jasmina Zito, who is quoted as saying she would rather use AI to speed repeatable work and protect the areas where people add the most value.

The September 24 blog post also excerpts three career stories from the ebook. It says Rebecca Taylor, now a researcher at Sophos X-Ops Counter Threat Unit, studied English and creative writing and entered SecureWorks as a personal assistant before moving into incident command and threat hunting. It says Cheryl Biswas returned to work after 10 years raising children, found a connection between technology and geopolitics through reading about Stuxnet, and later became active in the security conference community.

Filigran says its broader business provides open-source cybersecurity solutions for threat intelligence management, breach and attack simulation, and cyber risk management. No independent assessment of the ebook’s conclusions was provided in the supplied evidence.