GoCast Podcast: Julien Turcot & Vicky Desjardins (University of Montreal)

A GoCast interview with Vicky Desjardins, a PhD candidate in criminology at the University of Montreal, the day after her GoSec talk on ransomware defense. She describes a non-linear path from English literature into victimology, then criminology, driven by a puzzle: why do defenders keep losing to ransomware despite skill and effort. Rather than tracking constantly shifting tactics, she studied 139 ransomware strains from 2016 to 2023 to isolate the techniques that stayed stable over time, on the theory that a behavior that persists that long reflects a real operational necessity for attackers, and mapped defenses against those stable techniques. Her diagnosis of the defensive gap is less about missing tools than about excitement over new products fading before they are properly configured and tuned. She traces her research path through earlier work prioritizing online child-exploitation cases by risk before moving into ransomware and threat intelligence, credits mentors including Nadine, Andriane and Massara, and contrasts research priorities across regions: privacy and GDPR in Europe, criminology strength in Canada, defensive focus in the United States. She closes with advice to her younger self: don't let anyone tell you that you can't, and seek out other women already established in the field.