I’m very excited to announce that Yahoo’s chief information security officer, Bob Lord, will be joining TechCrunch for a fireside chat at Disrupt NY this year.
Since the news first broke last year that Yahoo had suffered two massive breaches — the biggest in history — we’ve had a lot of questions. How did this happen? Why did it take Yahoo years to discover that hackers were surreptitiously stealing user data from their networks? What could the theft of more than a billion users’ data teach us about cybersecurity? How would Yahoo secure user data going forward?
Some of those questions were answered this March when the Justice Department charged four hackers, two of them Russian intelligence service employees, for the 2014 hack that siphoned off 500 million Yahoo credentials. (A second 2013 hack that resulted in the loss of over a billion credentials remains unattributed.)
But we still want to hear more from Lord, who’s been leading the remediation and repair efforts at Yahoo. From Sony Pictures to Yahoo, it’s clear we still have a lot to learn about how to detect and respond to breaches at major companies. Who could possibly have more insight on breach detection and remediation than the person in charge of Yahoo’s security?
Because of the Justice Department’s investigation, there wasn’t much that Lord — or anyone else at Yahoo, for that matter — could say publicly about the breaches. Now that the investigation is over, we finally get to hear more about what went on inside Yahoo when the breaches were discovered and how they were addressed.
We won’t just be looking back at the events of the past several months, though. Lord will also share insights gleaned from more than 20 years’ experience in the security industry and discuss how security teams can make sure their work is seen and understood by CEOs and board members. Prior to joining Yahoo, Lord was the CISO of Rapid 7 and was the first-ever security hire at Twitter, where he formed Twitter’s approach to security and compliance.
The kinds of huge hacks Yahoo experienced are probably not going to stop anytime soon, so hopefully Lord can provide a roadmap for other CISOs to follow when they experience breaches of their own.
Join us in New York for this fascinating conversation. Disrupt NY runs May 15 to May 17, and Lord joins a cast of all-star speakers (for the cybersecurity fans, there’s also a fireside chat scheduled with Gen. Keith Alexander). You can check out the agenda here.
Tickets to Disrupt NY can be purchased here.
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