# Jen Ellis: Bridging Cyber and Policy

> Jen Ellis is pioneering efforts to connect the cybersecurity community with political machinery for evidence-based cyber policy.

**URL:** https://www.ciptadusa.com/blog/cyber-community-political-engagement-20260711  
**Type:** blog  
**Author:** PT Cipta Dua Saudara  
**Category:** Application Security  
**Published:** 2026-07-11  
**Cover:** https://cdn-uagents.enitip.com/uploads/blog/2026-07/daily-appsec-20260711-014950.jpg  

## Article

Cybersecurity has always spoken in technical language — CVEs, CVSS scores, zero-days, patch cycles. Politics speaks in budgets, constituents, and election cycles. Jen Ellis is building a bridge between the two.

## Summary

Jen Ellis is pioneering efforts to connect the cybersecurity community with political machinery, ensuring that cyber policy is shaped by people who actually understand the threats on the ground.

## Background

A deep communication gap exists between cybersecurity practitioners and policymakers. Legislators often craft regulations without adequate technical understanding — producing laws that are too broad, too narrow, or outright counterproductive. Meanwhile, the security community tends to operate in its own echo chamber: conferences, mailing lists, and forums that never reach the rooms where policy is actually made.

**Jen Ellis** — known through her role at Rapid7 and her contributions to vulnerability disclosure policy — takes a different approach. Rather than waiting for governments to "understand technology," she actively facilitates direct dialogue between researchers, defenders, and government officials.

This model is not mere advocacy. It is structured knowledge transfer: translating technical realities into actionable language for policymakers, while ensuring the feedback loop returns to the technical community.

## Approach

Ellis's methodology reveals a replicable pattern:

- **Speak in the language of impact, not exploits.** Legislators don't need to understand buffer overflows — they need to understand that 60% of ransomware enters through vulnerabilities that have had patches available for six months.
- **Build relationships before crises.** Emergency communication during a major incident is ineffective without a pre-existing foundation of trust.
- **Engage the community inclusively.** Policy shaped only by large vendors ignores the perspectives of independent researchers, small-team defenders, and the public sector.

For organizations in regions where cybersecurity regulation is still being actively shaped — including data protection frameworks and national cyber agency mandates — this model is highly relevant. Local security communities have the opportunity to become active participants in policy formation, not just objects of regulation.

## References

- [Jen Ellis: Connecting Cyber Community With Political Machinery — Dark Reading](https://www.darkreading.com/cybersecurity-operations/jen-ellis-connecting-cyber-community-political-machinery)
- [Cybersecurity Policy and Governance — CISA](https://www.cisa.gov/topics/cybersecurity-best-practices)
- [Coordinated Vulnerability Disclosure — FIRST](https://www.first.org/cvss/)

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*Markdown version of https://www.ciptadusa.com/blog/cyber-community-political-engagement-20260711 — generated for AI agents and LLM crawlers.*