About ten years ago, four women in Kara Viatori's family sat down and chose a new last name together. They went looking for something that meant more, and landed on a Latin word for traveler. Kara carries that name now as Director of Information Technology at MOCSA, a Kansas City nonprofit countering sexual violence, and the story is the doorway into a conversation about social engineering, burnout, and why curiosity is the real IT skill.
What You'll Hear
- Why four women in Kara's family legally changed their last name to a Latin word meaning traveler
- What MOCSA actually does across counseling, hospital advocacy, legal support, prevention education, and environmental design
- How Kara learned MS-DOS on her dad's family-room computer in first grade
- The QuickBooks support scam that tricked her into giving a stranger access to a client's server
- Why shame is the social engineer's best friend, and the parallel Kara draws to how sexual violence stays hidden
- How 50 to 70 hour weeks and an undiagnosed ADHD diagnosis pushed her out of IT for three years
- The morning shift at a coffee shop that became the bridge back to tech
- Why work-life integration, not balance, is what finally made IT sustainable for her
A last name chosen on purpose
Most last names are inherited without much thought. Kara's wasn't. About a decade ago, after a loss in her family, four women in her family sat with a question a lot of people avoid: what does our name actually mean, and do we want to keep carrying it? They decided to choose a new one. They wanted something they could live into.
They went looking in Latin and found viator, a word for traveler. They picked it from a short list, settled on the spelling Viatori, and Kara freely admits they pronounce it wrong. Her sister's kids are the first generation born with the new name. In the years since, Kara has traveled more than she ever expected, including a recent trip to Bolivia that she never imagined she'd take. The name didn't just mark a change. It started pulling her into a life that matched it.
What MOCSA actually does
Kara is the Director of Information Technology at MOCSA, a Kansas City nonprofit that works on both sides of the state line across seven counties with about 110 staff. Most people, including Kara before she joined, know MOCSA as a counseling organization. That part is real and it's free. Counselors work with clients from age seven through triple digits, any gender, because perpetrators and victims don't fit neat demographic boxes.
The rest of the work is wider than most donors realize. MOCSA runs a hospital advocacy program where on-call advocates and volunteers get dispatched when a nurse calls. Advocates also go with survivors to police stations, because reporting a crime is its own second hurdle. MOCSA trains police departments on trauma-informed interviewing. A small legal team, two people, handles protective orders and some prosecution work. Prevention educators go into schools to teach kids about consent, and the organization does environmental design consulting on how to plan safer spaces.
Kara's job sits underneath all of it. Before she came on about two years ago, MOCSA had no internal IT. An external vendor handled everything. She was hired to shore up security, own the environment, and manage the vendor relationship, because the records MOCSA holds are some of the most sensitive records a nonprofit can hold. Her role isn't direct service. But as she puts it, she gets to use her technical skills to protect the mission.
The QuickBooks support scam that worked on her
Kara's clearest story about social engineering isn't theoretical. It happened to her. She'd come back into IT after a burnout break and was working at a Kansas City MSP, serving small and midsize businesses. A client had a QuickBooks problem she couldn't solve, so she searched for QuickBooks support, called the first number that came up, and let the person on the other end remote into the server.
The person started poking around, opened Notepad, and began typing things like this will cost two thousand dollars to fix. That's when Kara's tech brain caught up. The numbers didn't compute. The behavior didn't match a real support call. The first result in the search wasn't QuickBooks. It was a paid ad placed exactly to catch someone in her situation. She kicked them out, audited the server for backdoors, and didn't sleep well until she was confident nothing had been dropped.
She still tells that story to staff at MOCSA on purpose. Her definition of social engineering is simple. It's a con, an attempt to trick someone into believing you're someone you're not to get information that usually leads to money. And the part people underestimate is the setup. She wasn't careless. She was worried. The accounting server was down on a payday. Stress narrowed her attention. That's the whole playbook. It's not technical brilliance. It's timing and emotional pressure, and it works on educated, skilled IT people. If it worked on her, it can work on anyone, and she wants the team to hear that before they ever click a link they shouldn't.
Shame is the real vulnerability
The part of social engineering Kara keeps coming back to isn't the attack. It's what happens after. Someone clicks a link, types a password, or realizes an hour later that the urgent email from the CEO wasn't from the CEO. The next move decides how bad it gets. Reporting it fast gives IT tools to contain the damage. Staying quiet lets the attacker settle in.
Shame is what keeps people quiet. How did I fall for that. Why did I click. I should have known better. Kara has deliberately worked at MOCSA to flip the culture on reporting. Yes, the training tells you not to click. Yes, there's pressure to be the human firewall. But if you do click, tell us immediately, and you are not in trouble. The reason we need to know is practical, not punitive. Early notice is the difference between an incident and a breach.
She draws a careful parallel, and it's earned given where she works. The same dynamic that lets a social engineer stay inside a network also lets perpetrators of sexual violence keep operating. Silence and shame protect the attacker, not the victim. She's not equating the two. She's pointing out that the lever is the same. Cultures that make it safe to say something happened shrink the window an attacker has to work with, in both directions.
Burnout, coffee, and the way back
Kara did not plan to leave IT. She just hit a wall. At a nationwide concrete construction company headquartered in Tiffany Springs, she spent about seven years as a network administrator. Fifty-hour weeks were normal. Bad weeks ran 60 to 70. A call from a higher-up at 6 p.m. on a Friday was just the job. She didn't have boundaries, didn't have language for why that was a problem, and didn't realize the ground was shifting under her until projects started slipping and her motivation flatlined. Undiagnosed ADHD was part of it. So was becoming a parent and wanting to actually be home.
She walked out thinking the problem was computers. She went to work at a coffee shop, opened in the mornings, roasted beans, watched the sun come up, and stayed out of IT for about three years. The first two, she was sure she was never going back. Then the curiosity started creeping in. A friend who ran a small IT company sat across from her at the coffee shop and asked if she wanted part-time work. She hadn't told anyone she was ready. The timing just lined up.
Her advice on spotting burnout is honest. When you're in it, you blame everything except the thing that's actually wrong. The company. The industry. The career. A vacation feels like the answer until you realize you don't want to go back at the end of it. What she didn't have back then was the vocabulary. She thought she hated IT. She didn't. She hated the shape of the job.
Work-life integration and standing on shoulders
Kara is allergic to the clean clock-in, clock-out version of IT work, and she's also allergic to the we're-all-family version that quietly burns people out. What she describes at MOCSA is closer to what Sam calls work-life integration. Her technical skills push a mission she cares about. She's brought her son in to meet the people she talks about at home. The job supports her family, and her family shows up in the job. It's not that work follows her home. It's that the two aren't at war.
She gives credit where it's due. Her dad let a first-grader play on the family's MS-DOS computer and didn't realize how many commands she'd memorized by watching him. He also has a business mind and has been a sounding board for every career move since. Her mom brought the emotional support and modeled the curiosity about people that now shapes how Kara thinks about security. And her supervisor at the construction group believed soft skills and adaptability mattered more than a pile of certifications, which is how someone with an associate's degree ended up running networks across multiple locations.
MOCSA is reachable through its crisis line for services, donations, and general questions. The website is mocsa.org. Kara's contact information is expected on the site in a month or two, and LinkedIn is the other place to find her.
About Kara Viatori
At the time of recording, Kara Viatori was Director of Information Technology at MOCSA, a Kansas City nonprofit countering sexual violence across seven counties on both sides of the Kansas-Missouri line. She holds an associate's degree in computer systems and network administration, came up through break-fix and network admin roles, and was hired to build MOCSA's first internal IT function and own security for the organization. mocsa.org