The Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity is pleased to announce our Fall 2017 Lunch Seminar Series. We are honored to welcome four distinguished speakers—Sean Zadig, Director, Oath (Yahoo) Threat Investigations; David Dill, Professor, Department of Computer Science at Stanford University; David Sanger, Chief Washington Correspondent for the New York Times; and Camille Francois, Principal Researcher for Jigsaw.
The overarching theme of this semester’s presentations will be “Cybersecurity and Democracy: The Shifting Implications of Citizenship in the Digital Age.” In the year since ODNI and DHS first announced that Russian intelligence hacked the Democratic National Committee, we have become increasingly cognizant of the many ways our reliance on technology can wield outsized influence on our democracy. Whether we are thinking about how Russian hacks influenced the outcome of the 2016 Presidential Election, the vulnerability of electronic voting machines, or whether social media echo chambers encourage biased news consumption, it is clear that cybersecurity is a national security concern.
Unless otherwise noted, CLTC lunch seminars take place from 12-1pm in South Hall, Room 205 on the UC Berkeley campus. A light lunch is included for attendees who RSVP in advance. Stay tuned to the CLTC newsletter and social media channels for updates.
Thursday, 9/28, 12-1pm
“The New Normal: Defending Against State Sponsored Attackers”
Sean Zadig, Director, Yahoo Threat Investigations
RSVP here
In 2014, Yahoo (now Oath) faced a sophisticated attack by Russian intelligence services. The resulting investigation concluded with the indictment of four individuals (including two FSB officers). This talk will describe the investigation, the transformation within the company as a result of the attack, and the new normal facing Internet companies in 2017 and beyond.
Sean Zadig is the Director of Threat Investigations within the Oath (formerly Yahoo) Paranoids team. At Oath, Sean focuses on child safety, cybercrime investigation and mitigation, threat intelligence, and protecting users who are targeted by government-sponsored attackers. Prior to joining Yahoo three years ago, he worked in Google’s Trust & Safety Team, and before that he was a Special Agent with the NASA Office of Inspector General, Computer Crimes Division. Prior to joining NASA Sean worked in information security for UC Davis. While at NASA, Sean was the lead agent on numerous cases resulting in arrests and convictions worldwide, including Nigeria, Estonia, China, South Africa, and the United States. These investigations spanned a variety of criminal activity, including child pornography, spam botnets, bulletproof hosting (3FN and McColo), click fraud (Operation Ghost Click), West African fraud, and computer intrusion. Sean holds a BS in Computer Science from UC Davis, a Masters in Criminal Justice from Boston University, and a PhD in Information Systems from Nova Southeastern University. Sean’s research at NSU focused on hacker deterrence and hacker innovation diffusion in underground communities.
Thursday, 10/12, 12-1pm
“Voting Computer Security in the Age of Cyber War”
David Dill, Professor, Department of Computer Science, Stanford University
RSVP here
We’ve known for decades that computerized vote-counting equipment is highly vulnerable to attack by people who want to affect the outcome of an election. This possibility has been made more concrete by the election of 2016, where there were widespread cyber-attacks against voter registration systems and intrusion into servers at local election offices. All of the factors are in place for effective and potentially undetected electronic tampering with election outcomes in the U.S. Fortunately, effective defenses are not particularly difficult or expensive—if, as a nation, we can find the will to get the job done. In this talk, Professor David Dill will describe the problem and the solution.
David L. Dill is the Donald E. Knuth Professor in the School of Engineering and Professor of Computer Science and, by courtesy, Electrical Engineering at Stanford University. He has been on the faculty at Stanford since 1987. He has an S.B. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1979), and an M.S and Ph.D. from Carnegie-Mellon University (1982 and 1987). Prof. Dill has research interests in a variety of areas, including computational systems biology and the theory and application of formal verification techniques to system designs, including hardware, protocols, and software. He has also done research in asynchronous circuit verification and synthesis, and in verification methods for hard real-time systems. From July 1995 to September 1996, he was Chief Scientist at 0-In Design Automation, and, since 2016, he has been Chief Scientist at Locuspoint Networks, LLC.
Prof. Dill has been working actively on policy issues in voting technology since 2003. He is the author of the “Resolution on Electronic Voting”, which calls for a voter-verifiable audit trail on all voting equipment, and which has been endorsed by thousands of people, including many of the top computer scientists in the U.S. He has testified on electronic voting before the U.S. Senate and the Commission on Federal Election Reform, co-chaired by Jimmy Carter and James Baker III. He is the founder of the Verified Voting Foundation and VerifiedVoting.org and is on the board of those organizations. In 2004, he received the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s “Pioneer Award” for “for spearheading and nurturing the popular movement for integrity and transparency in modern elections.”
Wednesday, 11/1, 4pm
David Sanger, Chief Washington Correspondent, The New York Times
RSVP here
David Sanger is a national security correspondent for The New York Times and one of the newspaper’s senior writers. He is also the bestselling author of Confront and Conceal: Obama’s Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power, and The Inheritance. He has been a member of two teams that won the Pulitzer Prize and has received numerous awards for coverage of the presidency and national security policy. He also teaches national security policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.
Confront and Conceal: Obama’s Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power, (Random House 2012) is an account of how President Barack Obama has dealth with foreign policy and national security challenges during his first term in office. It is a follow-up to his bestseller The Inheritance: The World Obama Confronts and the Challenges to American Power (Harmony, 2009), which explored the national security challenges that faced the new American president when he first took office. From 1999 until 2006, Mr. Sanger was White House correspondent for The New York Times covering one of the most tumultuous eras in American national security policy, from 9/11 through the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Twice in his 27-year career at the Times, Mr. Sanger has been a member of teams that won the Pulitzer Prize, first for the investigation into the causes of the Challenger disaster in 1986, and later for investigations into the struggles within the Clinton administration over controlling technology exports to China. He has also won the Weintal Prize for diplomatic reporting for his coverage of the Iraq and Korea crises, the Aldo Beckman prize for coverage of the Presidency, and, in two separate years, the Merriman Smith Memorial Award, for coverage of national security issues. Mr. Sanger has reported from New York, Washington and Tokyo, where he was bureau chief in the early 1990’s. He returned to Washington in 1994 as chief economic correspondent. In all of those roles, he has covered a wide variety of issues surrounding foreign policy, globalization, nuclear proliferation and Asian affairs, and was appointed chief Washington correspondent in 2006. Mr. Sanger graduated from Harvard College in 1982. He appears frequently on both public television and news shows, and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Aspen Strategy Group.
Thursday, 11/16, 12-1pm
Camille Francois, Principal Researcher, Jigsaw
RSVP here
Camille Francois is Principal Researcher at Jigsaw, a think tank and technology incubator within Google / Alphabet, where she is leading an interdisciplinary research program focused on state-sponsored cyber threats against civil society, and media manipulation. She also established an internal working group on fairness and algorithmic biases in machine learning. Previously, Camille served as a Special Advisor to the CTO of France within the Prime Minister’s Office, led research projects on cybersecurity and human rights for the Mozilla Foundation or the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and worked for Google’s Market Insights team. A Fulbright Fellow, Camille holds a Masters Degree in Human Rights from the French Institute of Political Sciences (Sciences-Po) and a Masters Degree in International Security from the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University. Camille was also a Fellow at the Harvard Berkman Center for Internet & Society (where she remains an Affiliate), and a visiting scholar at the Columbia Arnold A. Saltzman Institute for War and Peace Studies and at King’s College War Studies Department.
Camille’s research has focused on building out the notion of cyber peace, and on the intersection of human rights, cybersecurity, and cyber operations. A frequent speaker in international conferences, her work has appeared in various publications, including Wired, Defense Dossier, Le Monde Diplomatique, and Scientific American. Camille serves as a member of the Freedom Online Coalition’s Working Group on a Free & Secure Internet and is involved several free culture advocacy projects. She serves as a Digital Advisor for Libraries Without Borders, and she is on the Scientific Committee of the French Wikimedia Foundation.
