Tarah Wheeler

Today, every single person at an organization must feel confident in their ability to protect themselves against a minefield of risks. The new challenges of Artificial Intelligence, password hacking, email phishing, ransomware attacks—these emerging threats against every business have only been made more terrifying by the global move towards remote and hybrid work. And while it might be easy to fault someone who unwittingly clicks on a link—what people don’t realize is how vast and systematic this issue really is. Fortunately, Tarah Wheeler does.

Tarah is an information security executive, AI researcher specializing in natural language processing, social data scientist in international conflict, author, and poker player. Her resume includes work with organizations like Symantec, Splunk, and Microsoft, as well as revered institutions from Harvard to Oxford.  A white hat hacker, she knows how to proactively find security weaknesses and fix them before they can be exploited. And as a cybersecurity CSO, she shows leaders how to do the same. Tarah’s on-the-ground technical expertise is combined with such a clear, compelling, and humorous presentation style that it’s easy to understand even the most complex concepts.

“Tarah Wheeler is a brilliant role model.”Elissa Shevinsky, editor of Lean Out

Named the top female cybersecurity influencer in the world, Tarah is also the author of Women in Tech: Take Your Career to The Next Level with Practical Advice and Inspiring Stories, which details her experience in the male-dominated space of cybersecurity. A #1 Amazon career guide bestseller, it topped both the women in business and technology nonfiction lists. In addition to her technical know-how, she can expertly advise on how to improve the industry to include, support, and uplift women based on her own personal experience.

She is Chief Security Officer at TPO Group, a cybersecurity consulting firm focused on nation-state incident response, critical infrastructure, and cyber risk. She is a member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Board of Directors, where she chairs the Audit Committee, serves on the Governance Committee, and founded the annual EFF DEF CON Poker Tournament. She is Senior Fellow and Board Member at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy’s Cyber Policy Initiative, where she leads the next phase of DEF CON Franklin, a pioneering volunteer-driven cyber defense initiative protecting rural water utilities.

She is a doctoral scholar at the University of Oxford‘s Oxford Internet Institute and Fulbright Visiting Scholar at the Centre for the Resolution of Intractable Conflict, affiliated with the Changing Character of War Centre at Oxford. She is an IANS Research faculty member and a Foreign Policy contributor on cyber warfare. She served as Senior Fellow for Global Cyber Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations (2022–2025), where she testified before the US Senate on the Cyber Safety Review Board and moderated the RSAC 2024 keynote on Tech Diplomacy with US Cyber Ambassador Nathaniel Fick; she was elected to Life Membership at CFR in 2023.

She has been a US/UK Fulbright Scholar in Cyber Security, a Cyber Project Fellow at Harvard’s Belfer Center, the Brookings Institution’s contributing cybersecurity editor, and an International Security Fellow at New America leading cybersecurity capacity building with the Hewlett Foundation’s Cyber Initiative. She is a 5x founder and entrepreneur including founding Red Queen Technologies.

She has spoken and testified on information security at the United States Senate, European Union, NATO CCDCOE’s CyCon 2025 in Tallinn, Malaysian Securities Commission, Los Alamos National Laboratory, the OECD, FTC, and at universities including Stanford, West Point, and Oxford. She has been Head of Offensive Security & Technical Data Privacy at Splunk, Senior Director of Engineering and Principal Security Advocate at Symantec Website Security, and led projects at Microsoft Game Studios (Halo and Lips). She has multiple cashes in the World Series of Poker.