"You can't do today's security with yesterday's methods." That's a guiding principle for Facebook chief security officer Joe Sullivan, and the title of the presentation he'll give at the 2013 NDSS Symposium, 24-27 February in San Diego, California.
As the manager of teams responsible for product and information security at Facebook, Sullivan believes deeply in the need for operational security teams to remain creative, push limits and not settle into playing passive defense. He says innovation starts with any member of a security team and can inspire not only that team but a whole company to achieve security standards well beyond the minimum compliance standards some organizations accept.
Sullivan will give examples of different ways his team has evolved dramatically in the last year to address the growing security challenges faced by Facebook's unprecedented growth around the world, and show how willingness to innovate and take chances and unwillingness to fall back on accepted standards were fundamental to the team's success in each case.
Sullivan also manages Facebook teams responsible for investigations and law enforcement relations. In addition to spending most of his time promoting safety and security for Facebook users, he also works on other regulatory and privacy-related legal issues.
Prior to joining Facebook in 2008, Sullivan spent more than 6 years working in a number of different security and legal roles at PayPal and eBay, including at different times, overseeing user safety policies and company relations with law enforcement agencies around the world, guiding eBay's regulatory compliance efforts, and managing PayPal's North America legal team.
Before entering the private sector, Sullivan spent 8 years with the United States Department of Justice. He was the first federal prosecutor in a US Attorney's office dedicated full-time to fighting high-tech crime, working on many high profile Internet cases. These ranged from the digital evidence aspects of the 9/11 investigation to child predator, computer intrusion, and economic espionage cases. He was a founding member of a special unit based in Silicon Valley dedicated exclusively to high-tech crime prosecution.
NDSS 2013 will also feature more than 50 original research papers and short talks on a wide range of network and distributed system security threats. Organized by the Internet Society in cooperation with Usenix, the 2013 event is sponsored by Internet2, Afilias, the San Diego Supercomputer Center, Google, Microsoft Research and IEEE Security & Privacy Magazine. Additional details are at: