2 minute read
Raising the Bar for Computer Security
Jackson Holahan ‘05
Growing up in the San Francisco Bay Area just before the onset of the consumer internet age might predispose one for a career in technology. For Window Snyder ’93, who was raised in Northern California, it took a sojourn to New England to discover computer science and the field of information security that became her life’s work.
Window Snyder
Photo credit: Cody Glenn/Web Summit via Sportsfile
After earning a scholarship, Snyder opted to attend Choate, drawn by its location in Connecticut, far removed from her California roots. She did a little bit of everything at Choate: theater, festival choir, improv, crew, photography and math. She was thrilled to be around a group of smart, industrious peers, many of whom have become lifelong friends.
Snyder’s curiosity in math was sparked by a guest lecturer whose presentation centered on the intricacies of factoring prime numbers. Tackling non-Euclidian geometry became her academic goal, and heading off to college, she opted to include a major in computer science in addition to math because “I was basically taking all the classes anyway.”
In Boston in the mid-1990s, Snyder was a member of the hacker community, drawn by an interest in the lack of security in most software applications at the time. She and a group of like-minded programmers bought a 56k dedicated dialup modem and moved it into their house, called “New Hack City.” Here they participated in a nascent community of “hacktivism,” where they identified system and software vulnerabilities and pressured companies to work harder to protect their customers’ security. In the mid-1990s this field of security research could barely be called a career. Snyder noted that there was no market and no career path for her and her peers at the time. That changed quickly.
Security research did not remain a backwater for long. In fact, it has grown to be one of the most highly demanded skillsets within the industry, particularly given the high-profile breaches on commercial and government systems that have become routine. Snyder has been a key member of the community since the early days. While at Microsoft, she was an author of Threat Modeling, a work that detailed the security practice of assessing weaknesses and implementing fixes that has since become an industry standard. During her time at Apple, she was a leader on the team that designed and deployed the security and privacy features of iOS. Apple’s current focus on protecting its users’ data is a market differentiator, but Snyder notes that such strict controls were not an easy sell to Apple’s executive team early on.
Window also served on Choate Rosemary Hall’s Board of Trustees from 2007 to 2013. After stints at Mozilla and Intel, Snyder was recently named the Chief Security Officer at Square. Having worked in security roles in hardware and software in both the profit and nonprofit sectors. Snyder says that her professional motivation is to build and deploy security solutions that “people can actually use.” While most people and organizations find it hard “to justify spending money [for cybersecurity] until they feel the pain,” Snyder sees her role as making the informed case for security investment ahead of that organizational pain. While financial services firms have long understood the risks of weak cybersecurity, she notes that the manufacturing industry and the public sector alike are beginning to adopt defense measures more rapidly in the presence of increasing threats.
Jackson Holahan ’05 is Director of Strategy and Business Development at Logikcull.com.
