Nicki Swart
Nicki is an Information System Security Officer with more than a decade of experience in IT, including several years focused on cybersecurity. She specializes in governance, risk, and compliance, security awareness, vulnerability management, incident response, and building practical security programs.
In addition to her professional work, she teaches IT and cybersecurity courses at WSU Tech, where she helps prepare the next generation of technology professionals. She is also active in the cybersecurity community as a speaker and volunteer leader, including involvement with ISC² and the Global Women’s Leadership Network.
Her approach to cybersecurity focuses on making security practical, approachable, and integrated into the way organizations actually work—not simply adding more controls or policies.
Session
Cybersecurity often treats people as the weakest link, but what if we're looking at the problem backwards?
Employees rarely intend to create security incidents. They're trying to help a customer, meet a deadline, solve a technical problem, follow instructions, or simply get their job done. Yet reasonable decisions can still produce unreasonable security outcomes.
This session explores how organizations can build a healthy security culture that turns human behavior from a source of risk into an additional layer of defense. We'll examine what happens when employees bypass controls to get their jobs done, hesitate to report mistakes, or place too much trust in technology—including exploring examples of people acting on AI recommendations without fully understanding the consequences.
The goal isn't to create employees who never make mistakes. It's to create an environment where people feel empowered to pause, question, verify, and report—and where security is viewed not as an obstacle to the business, but as something everyone participates in.