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Nuria Triguero
Malaga
Thursday, 19 September 2024, 09:07
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The Democratic Party's candidate for the US presidency, Kamala Harris, has entrusted the cybersecurity of her campaign to a woman from Malaga province: Soledad Antelada. The computer engineer from Marbella is taking a major turn in her tech career, now becoming involved in the front line of politics after a brilliant career in the United States that began in the academic world (she was the first woman in the Security Department of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory). Shen then continued in the private sector until she signed up with Google two years ago. Antelada has announced that she has joined the Harris campaign as deputy chief information security officer.
In this new role, Antelada will be responsible for ensuring information security for the Harris campaign, an important mission given the heightened risk of cyber-attacks and disinformation as the US election battle unfolds. "It's a great opportunity to bring my cybersecurity and leadership experience to a team dedicated to creating positive change. It is especially meaningful in many ways, not least because we are kicking off Hispanic Heritage Month. I look forward to working with this incredible team and supporting our shared vision for the future," Antelada stated on LinkedIn. In response to SUR's questions, she apologised that she could not comment further at this time. "We'll talk after the elections," she promised
Soledad Antelada Toledano was actually born in Argentina in 1978. She was only four years old when she moved to Spain with her parents because of the dictatorship in her home country. Marbella was the place where they settled and, when it was time to go to university, she studied computer engineering at the University of Malaga (UMA). For some eight years after graduating she worked as a software developer, but her interest in cybersecurity led her to quit her job and book a one-way ticket to San Francisco to do a master's degree in the subject. She recalled in an interview with SUR: "I was a real kamikaze - all or nothing. I invested all my savings in a two-year master's degree in cybersecurity. It was a field I was completely unfamiliar with, but it appealed to me: learning to be a hacker seemed fascinating."
Her intuition did not fail her: she became passionate about cybersecurity. She excelled so much in her studies that a professor recommended her for an internship at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, home to thirteen Nobel Prize winners, where she ended up becoming the first woman and the first person of Hispanic origin in its cybersecurity department. By 2017 she had already been named as one of the twenty most influential Latino professionals in the US technology sector. In addition, Antelada was taking on other professional challenges in parallel, such as being the head of security for several rounds of SCinet, the network that is set up every year to support all the activities linked to the US Supercomputing Conference (now called the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis).
In 2022 Soledad took another step in her career, leaving Berkeley Lab to join Google where she worked as a security technical programme manager in the Mountain View office for CISO (Chief Information Security Office).
A fierce and tenacious, but ethical, hacker from the Costa del Sol, she has always stood out for her strong social conscience, which she has demonstrated by developing her activist side, especially in the field of feminism and within the Latino community in the United States. She is the founder of GirlsCanHack, a non-profit organisation that promotes pulling more women into technology in general and in the world of cybersecurity in particular. Her opinion on this is that the only way to combat the machismo that still reigns in tech companies is for more women to join the field and to support one another as a sisterhood. She leads by example: she gives talks, organises meetings and mentors young women who are just starting out in the profession. As she put it in her last interview with SUR: "The partnership and support between women is vital."
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