Data Breaches and Multiple Points to Stop Them
Wednesday, December 1 at 6 p.m.
Speaker: Daphne Yao
To many people, preventing data breaches appears to be an unattainable goal. However, this impression is not accurate. We will first explain the reasons behind some of the high-profile data breach incidents (including Equifax and Target). Then, I will show that there are usually multiple opportunities to prevent, detect, or stop a data breach. I will also discuss the roles of regulations, e.g., Data Security Standard from the Payment Card Industry, and non-technical factors, such as organizational culture, in cybersecurity. Because of the cat-and-mouse nature of cybersecurity, achieving absolute data security is impossible. However, being proactive in cybersecurity will substantially reduce the risks.
This talk is part of our public outreach lecture series, CPI Talks. CPI Talks are open to everyone— even high school students and non-Waterloo students/staff can join!
Click here to watch this recording on Youtube!
Professor of Computer Science
Virginia Tech
Dr. Danfeng (Daphne) Yao is an Elizabeth and James E. Turner Jr. ’56 Faculty Fellow and CACI Faculty Fellow. Her research interests include building cyber defenses, as well as machine learning for digital health, with a shared focus on accuracy and deployment. She creates new models, algorithms, techniques, and deployment-quality tools for securing large-scale software and systems. Her tool CryptoGuard helps large software companies and Apache projects harden their cryptographic code. She systematized program anomaly detection in the book Anomaly Detection as a Service. Her patents on anomaly detection are extremely influential in the industry, cited by patents from major cybersecurity firms and technology companies, including FireEye, Symantec, Qualcomm, Cisco, IBM, SAP, Boeing, and Palo Alto Networks. Her IEEE TIFS papers on enterprise data loss prevention were viewed over 30,000 times. Dr. Yao received the prestigious ACM CODASPY Lasting Research Award in 2021. Previously, she received the NSF CAREER Award and ARO Young Investigator Award. Dr. Yao is the ACM SIGSAC Vice Chair and is a member of the ACM SIGSAC executive committee since 2017. She spearheads multiple inclusive excellence initiatives, including the NSF-sponsored Individualized Cybersecurity Research Mentoring (iMentor) Workshop. Daphne received her Ph.D. degree from Brown University (Computer Science), M.S. degrees from Princeton University (Chemistry) and Indiana University (Computer Science), Bloomington, B.S. degree from Peking University in China (Chemistry).