Tarah Wheeler

Generative AI is changing the cybersecurity game, says cybersecurity CEO Tarah Wheeler. On the offensive side, AI has enabled better tuned, carefully crafted, devastatingly dangerous spear-phishing attacks. On the defensive side, AI can integrate with your SOC tools to give you fewer and more effective notifications (what she calls “less, better, info”). Either way, you can’t ignore it—you have to understand and leverage it today.

Drawing on her years of experience in cybersecurity with Microsoft, Harvard, and more, Tarah takes you through both the offensive and defensive sides, illuminating what you need to know and why you need to know it. This practical and engaging talk is customizable to your audience’s experience level—whether she’s speaking to engineers, marketers, or CEOs, Tarah offers clear and actionable steps and solutions for everyone. You’ll walk away with a better understanding of how you can protect yourself from AI-enabled attacks and how you can use AI to streamline your processes and improve the quality of your information. In a field that’s changing every day, Tarah’s up-to-date insights and wealth of practical experience are invaluable for any audience.

Spear-phishing and business intelligence theft has increased multi-fold since the shift to remote and hybrid work, and cyber and ransomware attacks have cost companies millions of dollars. Given the current situation, transitioning skilled employees to security awareness has never been more difficult or more timely. How can we effectively prepare our employees now that data is not only secured through the office, but is now often left to the good graces of our home internet?

Internationally renowned cyber operations expert Tarah Wheeler is here to help. Mobility is part of modernity, she says. Hybrid work isn’t going anywhere, so it’s imperative that we learn how to properly secure employee data and company laptops at home—which means investing in our people and teaching them how to be personally secure. For every expert who knows the right way to do things, there are a dozen people to whom this is brand new information. Tarah has a deep knowledge and expertise of the security challenges employees don’t even know they’re facing yet. In this talk, she shares the ins-and-outs of digital security in today’s world of work, so we can keep ourselves (and our data) safe.

Despite noble initiatives designed to inspire girls to seek careers in the STEM fields, women are still vastly outnumbered by men—and the disparity is only getting worse. Tarah Wheeler says women don’t need more inspiration—they already love science! But they do need help dismantling widespread and insidious discrimination: forces that mean “diversity” looks like one token woman amid scores of men, that mean women make much less than their male peers, and that ensure they rarely ascend to the same level of influence.

This isn’t the result of some conspiracy, Tarah argues—rather, it’s a larger problem of unconscious social biases that companies rarely confront, and can barely resolve beyond the safest initiatives. So, in this compassionate, inspiring talk, Tarah shows students, professionals, associations, and companies how to fight for meaningful gender equality at work. With advice on salary negotiation, when to change careers, how to mentor others or start a business, balance family matters, and even how to best format resumes or ace interviews, Tarah lays out practical advice for anyone, no matter where they are on the corporate ladder.

It’s time to stop watching women get sidelined, stuck, or overlooked in tech, and time to let them bring their wealth of creativity and innovation to the field—at all levels of influence.