Alex Stamos General Information

Description

Mr. Alex Stamos serves as Venture Partner at Felicis Ventures. Prior to joining Stanford, Mr. Stamos served as the Chief Security Officer at Facebook. In this role, he led a team of engineers, researchers, investigators and analysts charged with understanding and mitigating information security risks to the company and safety risks to the 2.5 billion people on Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. During his time at Facebook, he led the company's investigation into manipulation of the 2016 US election and helped pioneer several successful protections against these new classes of abuse. In April 2017, he co-authored "Information Operations and Facebook", a highly cited examination of the influence campaign against the US election, which still stands as the most thorough description of the issue by a major technology company. Before joining Facebook, he was the Chief Information Security Officer at Yahoo, rebuilding a storied security team while dealing with multiple assaults by nation-state actors. He also represented the company in an open hearing of the US Senate's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. He served as Board Member at Signal Sciences. He was the CTO of Artemis, the division of NCC Group. In 2004, he co-founded iSEC Partners and also serves as a partner at iSEC Partners Inc., a strategic digital security organization. As a trusted partner to world's largest technology firms, he coordinated the response to the "Aurora" attacks by the People's Liberation Army at multiple Silicon Valley firms and led groundbreaking work securing the world's largest desktop and mobile platforms. During this time, he also served as an expert witness in several notable civil and criminal cases, such as the Google Street View incident and pro bono work for the defendants in Sony vs George Hotz and US vs Aaron Swartz. After the 2010 acquisition of iSEC Partners by NCC Group, he formed an experimental R&D division at the combined company, producing five patents. He is an experienced security engineer and a leading researcher in the field of web application and mobile security. He has been a featured speaker at top industry conferences such as Black Hat, Web 2.0 Expo, CanSecWest, DefCon, SyScan, Microsoft BlueHat, and OWASP App Sec. Throughout his career, he has worked toward making security a more representative field and has highlighted the work of diverse technologists as an organizer of the Trustworthy Technology Conference and OURSA. He holds a bachelor of science in electrical engineering from the University of California, Berkeley. He has been involved with securing the US election system as a contributor to Harvard's Defending Digital Democracy Project and involved in the academic community as an advisor to Stanford's Cybersecurity Policy Program and UC Berkeley's Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity. He is a member of the Aspen Institute's Cyber Security Task Force, the Bay Area CSO Council and the Council on Foreign Relations. He also serves on the advisory board to NATO's Collective Cybersecurity Center of Excellence in Tallinn, Estonia. Mr. Stamos is a cybersecurity expert, business leader and entrepreneur working to improve the security and safety of the Internet through his teaching and research at Stanford University. Mr. Stamos is an Adjunct Professor at Stanford's Freeman-Spogli Institute and a visiting scholar at the Hoover Institution. He worked under Prof. David Patterson while earning a BS in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at UC Berkeley. A noted speaker and writer, he has appeared at the Munich Security Conference, NATO CyCon, Web Summit, DEF CON, CanSecWest and numerous other events. His 2017 keynote at Black Hat was noted for its call for a security industry more representative of the diverse people it serves and the actual risks they face. Throughout his career, he has worked toward making security a more representative field and has highlighted the work of diverse technologists as an organizer of the Trustworthy Technology Conference and OURSA. He has been involved with securing the US election system as a contributor to Harvard's Defending Digital Democracy Project and involved in the academic community as an advisor to Stanford's Cybersecurity Policy Program and UC Berkeley's Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity. He is a member of the Aspen Institute's Cyber Security Task Force, the Bay Area CSO Council and the Council on Foreign Relations. He also serves on the advisory board to NATO's Collective Cybersecurity Center of Excellence in Tallinn, Estonia.