College of Applied Sci & Tech

Prior to joining the University of Arizona, Dr. Alharthi worked as a Cloud Security Engineer at Farmers Insurance, a Resident Engineer at Palo Alto Networks, and Prisma Cloud Consultant at Dell. She was awarded the Division of Teaching Excellence and Innovation (DTEI) Fellowship by the University of California, Irvine, and obtained both CompTIA Security+ and AWS Solutions Architect certifications.

Dr. Alharthi’s research interests are as follows. Cloud Security; Container Security; Penetration Testing; Digital Forensics and Incident Response (DFIR); Human-Computer Interaction (HCI); Privacy; Cybersecurity Education; and Machine Learning. She is also interested in conducting research on the intersection between Cybersecurity and Public Administration; Cybersecurity and Business Administration; and Cybersecurity and Education.

Dr. Alharthi published several research papers on the topic of Social Engineering Defense Mechanisms and InfoSec Policies. Currently, she is working on a research project on the topic of Mitigating Cyberattacks Against Public Cloud (AWS, Azure, and GCP). The ultimate goal is to use an optimization approach and experimental research methods to come up with a customizable model of cloud security that organizations can adopt.