Ms. Atwood has more than twenty five years of experience in delivering information security strategies, policies, practices and procedures for secure and confidential communication throughout the business enterprise. She has assisted fortune 500 companies and the US military with assessing industry regulatory impacts and implementing security solutions to reduce business risk.

While at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Ms. Atwood became an expert in US military certification and accreditation standards for classified systems deployed by the Lab to military command centers. She was responsible for documenting each system to DoD trusted computing systems with controlled access standards and included development of: configuration diagrams, threat analysis, security procedures, business continuity and disaster recovery plans, test plans, and providing training of system administrators for certification testing in the United States, Central America, and Europe.

At BBN, later GTE Internetworking and then Verizon/Genuity, she participated in multiple security assessments of telecommunication and cable networks for clients in Canada, Central, and South America. She established network security standards, gap closure programs and provided program management.

She joined Electronic Data Systems (EDS) as an executive consultant working with their top 100 accounts improving delivery of security and data privacy controls for clients in the financial and healthcare industries. Later, as the Chief Privacy Officer for a joint venture of EDS, She was responsible for the end-to-end security and data privacy program that addressed global data privacy regulations and US breach notification laws for delivery of application, business process, and Internet technology.

Since joining N&ST in 2008, Ms. Atwood has conducted several assessments for clients in the electric power industry for compliance to NERC Critical Infrastructure Protection Cyber Security Standards.

Ms. Atwood received a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science degree from California Lutheran University in Thousand Oaks, California. Ms. Atwood is an International Association of Privacy Professionals Certified Information Privacy Professional (CIPP. She is a Lean Six Sigma Practitioner.