Ellie Watts

Ellie’s Psychology degree, gained in her home country of England, was an unlikely springboard into a career in cyber security.

Despite no traditional technical background, a deep-rooted interest into the weird and wonderful aspects of human behaviour navigated her into her first cyber role in social engineering simulation, training, and awareness. This led to delivering complex security behaviour uplift programs to enterprise organisations across the globe.

Particular professional highlights include a personal record of one million simulated phishing emails sent to one client in a year, and running round a bank in South Africa scattering USB sticks, aiming to see who would plug it in and click the totally legitimate looking file labeled ‘EMPLOYEE PERSONAL BONUSES’.

Since then, one move across the pond later, Ellie has worked in the MxDR space in Australia delivering capability and service uplift for clients across the Asia Pacific region. Most recently, Ellie is now truly gaining an insight into the width and breadth of human behaviour, leading client delivery in APAC for cyber incident response, crisis management, and cyber incident readiness and preparedness services at Accenture.