A cybersecurity conference for women that starts today will now be available through Facebook Live streaming.

The event sold out within 45 minutes, organizers said. More than 1,300 people are expected to attend the event hosted by Carnegie Mellon University.

Now in its sixth year, the Women in CyberSecurity Conference was organized by and for women, who just five years ago, represented fewer than 11 percent of the workforce.

“People only hear about cybersecurity when something bad happens,” said Ambareen Siraj, a Tennessee Tech University computer science professor and founding chair of WiCyS, which organized the event. “The fact that you and I do our business online is because of cybersecurity professionals.”

Concerned with the dearth of female professionals in cybersecurity, Siraj started the organization in 2013 with a $294,000 grant in the hopes of attracting more women and addressing what she called a pipeline issue. Founding partners include Cisco, Facebook and the Palo Alto Networks. The first conference in Nashville drew more than 350 people in 2014.

Today WiCyS is a nonprofit organization with nearly 4,000 members.

The three-day conference starts today at the Wyndham Grand Hotel in Pittsburgh.

Among the conference speakers are Michele Schochet, Facebook director of security; Wendy Nather, duo security at Cisco; and Lorrie Cranor, director of CyLab, CMU’s security and privacy institute.

To follow the conference on Facebook, click here.

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