Keren Elazari

Biography

Keren Elazari is a hacker turned digital security expert and a research fellow with the Yuval Ne’eman Workshop for Science, Technology and Security at Tel Aviv University, where she explores the intersection of cyber conflict and politics.

As well as working for leading digital and technology blog GigaOM as cybersecurity Industry Analyst, Keren has served as a Teaching Fellow on security at Silicon Valley’s Singularity University, and as a Senior Researcher at Tel Aviv University Interdisciplinary Cyber Research Center. She’s also held roles at international security systems company Verint, and at AT&T and PwC, as well as working with governments and international organisations. She's the founder of Leading Cyber Ladies, a global network for women professionals working in cybersecurity, and of BSidesTLV, Israel's largest security community event. She crosses academia, the business and security worlds researching the ever-evolving threats facing all aspects of web.

Cited by Forbes as one of the '20 Hackers Who Shaped History', Keren considers the role hackers play in shaping the digital landscape. With information the currency of a digital society, control and manipulation of that information gives huge power to a small number of companies and agencies. Often what is being done with that information, and its security, is something only hackers can thoroughly investigate.

In her acclaimed, hit TED speech, Hackers: the Internet's immune system, Keren sugests that, whilst hackers may have a bad reputation, many perform a vital role in finding (and fixing) security flaws, exposing malicious web users, and raising awareness of social, commercial and political issues outside cyberspace.

With examples from the Arab Spring uprisings to flaws in Facebook’s security, many hackers act in benign ways, taking on social, political, and increasingly military disputes. So how can hackers be encouraged to do good? How can they be embraced by established organisations whilst retaining their freedom to operate? And what happens when hackers work on both sides?