Betsy Mugo Bevilacqua did not arrive in cybersecurity by chasing titles or trends. Her path looks more like a series of crossings, geographic, cultural, and intellectual, shaped by curiosity, responsibility, and a quiet refusal to accept systems as they are simply because that’s how they’ve always been.

She was born in Nairobi, Kenya, a place where infrastructure is not abstract. When systems fail, people feel it immediately. Power. Connectivity. Access. Trust. These are not academic concepts. They are daily realities. That early context matters, even if it doesn’t announce itself loudly. It shows up later in how she thinks about risk, scale, and who ultimately pays the price when technology breaks.

Her formal journey into tech began in the United States, in Buffalo, New York, where she initially planned to become a lawyer. Law made sense. Rules. Accountability. Structure. But computers pulled harder. She didn’t start at the top. She started where many early security professionals did, in the data center, on the help desk, inside the cable industry. Close to the machines. Close to the users. Close to the friction.

A turning point came through a professor who was moonlighting with the FBI on cybercrime and introduced one of the school’s earliest cybersecurity courses. Betsy has described it simply. She knew. Not that it would be easy. Not that it would be lucrative. Just that it was right.

That instinct guided her through industries that rarely share a common language. Healthcare. Insurance. Technology. Platforms that touch millions. Platforms that touch billions. She entered security at a time when the role itself was still forming, when there was no clean definition of what a CISO was supposed to be. That ambiguity became an advantage.

After nearly a decade in Buffalo, she moved west during the uncertainty following the housing crisis. It wasn’t a calculated leap. It was a necessary one. She jokes that she’s “solar powered,” but the move also marked a shift from maintaining systems to shaping them.

At eBay, during the era when eBay and PayPal were still one company, Betsy ran risk programs inside an organization shaped heavily by acquisition. She describes working across a landscape of dozens of acquired companies, each with its own security posture and level of maturity. Her work was not about locking things down. It was about making the invisible legible. Creating standards. Creating language. Creating a way for leaders to see risk clearly enough to act.

Then came Facebook.

If eBay taught her how systems grow unevenly, Facebook taught her what happens when scale stops being theoretical. She describes joining during a period when the platform was already massive, and watching it grow to well over a billion users during her tenure. Growth wasn’t a strategy. It was the environment.

At Facebook, Betsy led security assurance and later operations, working at the seam where regulation, technology, and human behavior collide. She saw firsthand that security doesn’t fail because people are careless. It fails when culture treats security as an obstacle instead of a shared responsibility.

That insight shaped her approach. At Facebook, she ran an internal security awareness program known as Hacktober, which became one of the most effective ways the security team engaged the broader organization. Rather than relying on fear or compliance-driven tactics, the program emphasized participation, curiosity, and shared responsibility. Security became something people joined, not something imposed on them.

She later adapted this approach in other environments, including at Chainalysis, where she developed similar initiatives tailored to the company’s culture and risk profile. Trust, in her view, scales better than fear.

After Facebook, Betsy returned east with her family. Proximity mattered again. So did impact.

At Butterfly Network, a medical device company digitizing ultrasound through a probe connected to a smartphone, she held responsibility for both IT and security. Smaller teams. Tighter budgets. Higher regulatory stakes. Hardware. Cloud. Early AI. Patient data. The systems were smaller, but the consequences were just as real. Here, security wasn’t protecting engagement metrics. It was protecting lives.

Later, at Chainalysis, Betsy entered the blockchain and crypto space, an environment where trust is constantly questioned and often misunderstood. She built security during a period of rapid growth, knowing when to do the work herself and when to step back and bring in leaders whose strengths complemented her own. Security leadership, in her view, isn’t about owning everything. It’s about knowing what to let go.

Parallel to her corporate work, Betsy has always kept one foot oriented toward the continent she came from. In 2018, she co-founded Tabiri Analytics with partners across East Africa, building cybersecurity monitoring and threat detection capabilities for organizations that rarely appear in glossy vendor decks. The premise was simple and radical. Security expertise should not be a luxury reserved for the Global North.

Today, she continues that work through startup advising and through an incident response company focused primarily on East Africa, while also supporting smaller organizations in the United States. Her throughline has never changed. Systems matter. People matter more. And when security fails, it is rarely evenly distributed.

Betsy does not romanticize cybersecurity. She speaks openly about the emotional weight of the work. The trade-offs. The responsibility of holding risk on behalf of others. But she also sees security as a deeply human discipline. One that, when done well, allows societies to move forward without breaking themselves in the process.

In a world accelerating toward AI, automation, and systems that increasingly mediate how we live, her perspective is grounded and quietly insistent. Listen to the people closest to the risk. Resource the work. Build trust before you need it.

Security, in her view, is not about control.

It’s about stewardship.