My friend Michelle Novenda has been working in cybersecurity for a few years now, and I wanted to share some of her insights with the 她 Ta Zhi Dao and wider community of interested folks, because some of the work she does, like figuring out how to hack into corporate systems through social engineering, is pretty cool.
Michelle was actually my intern when I was at AppWorks, and I chose her because of her impressive background as an international student studying computer science in Hsinchu, and over the years, we’ve become close friends, and I’ve watched her develop her career into something really meaningful to her.
At the same time, scams are rampant in Taiwan and across Asia, and also especially in the crypto space, which I believe is one of the biggest roadblocks in bringing on more people to adopting crypto. Crypto is still so new and therefore quite unregulated, so it’s increasingly important for individuals who are interested in getting into the space to know how to protect themselves online. We don’t get into crypto scams specifically, since Michelle’s world is corporate security, but the underlying principles are still relevant, like how to be cautious about your personal information.
I was also curious about what went into making podcasts, and I wanted to expand my marketing toolkit to include creating videos, so last November, we decided to record a video about Michelle’s experiences understanding what hackers do when they want to scam someone online. We think this is especially important for women as well, which is why I want to highlight it through TZD’s platform.
We talk about:
What drew Michelle to get into cybersecurity from computer science
What scammers look for when they’re collecting information about you
How to be more comfortable as a non-technical person around technical people
Hope you enjoy the video!
I also wanted to spend a little time explaining the process of making this content, especially for those who want to try it themselves. I am a complete newbie; I don’t make Reels or TikToks, and I had no idea what goes into creating a YouTube video.
Of course with AI search, it’s much easier to know how to get started, what equipment I need, and what tools to use:
I bought a set of small mics and a sturdy phone stand from Amazon.
Michelle and I met up a few times to discuss what the rundown would be. We didn’t do a test run, because I believe that the magic happens in the moment, and I wanted to save that for the actual recording.
Once we had a date and time, I booked a room from Happ, which is a space booking platform in Taiwan, for 4 hours so there’s enough buffer before, after, and during the interview. I brought the equipment, a charger for my phone, and we recorded it in one shot (with the intention of making lots of edits afterwards).
I had over an hour of footage, and I used Descript to edit it for both YouTube and Reels. Descript is great because it has a built-in AI chat that I can just ask how I want the edits to look like — adding a transcript, adding subtitles, text overlays, music fading in and out, panning and zooming close-ups, and cropping the ratio so it fits for Reels as well. The biggest downside is that since I was a newbie, I made a ton of editing mistakes so I used up a lot of the AI credits and had to pay a bit more, but it’s worth the learning fees.
That was pretty much it! But it took a long time to go through everything, about 4 months from early discussions to finally publishing the content. Kudos to those that make video content regularly; it’s definitely not easy, but I’m glad I tried it. And if you enjoyed the video, I hope you get to meet Michelle someday.
