How a marketing professional changed course for cybersecurity How effectively can you change careers in midstream? • 4 min read Is it ever too late to make a career change? One cyber professional doesn’t think so. Lucie Cardiet, cyber threat research manager at AI security company Vectra AI, told IT Brew that she started out in sales and marketing. However, curiosity about cyberattackers eventually led to her current career in cybersecurity. How it started. Cardiet’s background is in digital marketing, with a strong focus on web design and development. She spent a few years freelancing for the websites of small businesses and IT companies, and started working with Vectra AI in 2021 as a freelance web marketing consultant. She then joined the team full-time in 2022 as a marketing manager, before leaping to the cybersecurity team in 2024. “When I joined Vectra AI, I cared about the technical health of the site, but the real mission was bringing in traffic,” Cardiet wrote in an email to IT Brew. “Trust is what makes that work, especially in cybersecurity, where the audience has zero patience for marketing language and is hunting for content that actually teaches them something.” At Vectra AI, she had to write cybersecurity-focused content, driving her to deeply understand the topic. “I did not get the chance to study engineering, so I went into sales and marketing,” Cardiet wrote. “But I read a lot, and what I have learned is that with curiosity and motivation, you can take yourself further than your original path suggests.” How curious? Cardiet said that when she first started training in cyber, she discovered open-source intelligence (OSINT), or the practice of drawing from public sources like social media and websites to evaluate cyber threats. From there, her training consisted of hundreds of hours of