Alex Stamos

Alex Stamos is a cybersecurity expert, business leader, and entrepreneur who has dedicated his career to improving the security and safety of the Internet. He serves as the Chief Security Officer for Corridor, whose mission is to help developers build secure products quickly and prevent vulnerabilities from the start. At the same time, he is an adjunct professor at Stanford University, where his teaching and research focuses on international security and cooperation.

Formerly Facebook’s chief security officer and Yahoo’s chief information security officer,
Stamos is regarded among the most authoritative experts and problem-solvers in his field. The New York Times called Stamos “a celebrated figure in privacy and security circles,” and Tech Crunch said he is “widely regarded as one of the smartest people working in the security space.” Stamos helps groups better understand and recognize cyber threats, while sharing clear and comprehensible strategies for how organizations can arm themselves against bad actors and ensure the security of their information.

During Stamos’ tenure as chief security officer at Facebook, he was 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. Stamos represented the company to regulators, lawmakers, and civil society on six continents, and has served as a bridge between the interests of the Internet policy community and the complicated reality of platforms operating at billion-user scale. 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. Before joining Facebook, Stamos was the chief information security officer at Yahoo, rebuilding a storied security team while dealing with multiple assaults by nation-state actors.

In 2004, Alex co-founded iSEC Partners, an elite security consultancy. As a trusted partner to world’s largest technology firms, Alex 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. He also served as an expert witness in several notable civil and criminal cases, such as the Google Street View incident, Sony vs George Hotz and US vs Aaron Swartz. After the 2010 acquisition of iSEC Partners by NCC Group, Alex formed an experimental R&D division at the combined company, producing five patents.

Stamos was previously a member of the DHS Cybersecurity Advisory Council, the Annan
Commission on Elections and Democracy and the Aspen Commission on Information Disorder. He is a member of the Aspen Institute’s Cyber Security Task Force, the Bay Area CSO Council and the Council on Foreign Relations, and also serves on the advisory board to NATO’s Collective Cybersecurity Center of Excellence in Tallinn, Estonia. Stamos has a BS in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the University of
California, Berkeley. He lives in the Bay Area with his wife and three children.