Risky Business feature interview: Bob Lord, CSO, Democratic National Committee

In this podcast you’ll hear an interview I did with Bob Lord, the Chief Security Officer for the Democratic National Committee, the DNC. Bob has previously served as the CISOs for both Yahoo and Twitter, before spending some time in vendorland with Rapid7 as their CISO in residence.

The state-sponsored attack against the DNC is without doubt the most politically consequential data theft event the planet has ever witnessed. It trumped both the Manning/Wikileaks disclosures and “climategate” in terms of impact, and indeed to a large degree the fallout of the DNC hack is still ongoing.

So, I wanted to bring Bob in to talk about his job.

The DNC isn’t a large organisation, in a head office sense. They have about 200 core staff members, but as you’ll hear, a political organisation’s IT setup is pretty atypical. So Bob and I mostly just spoke about how one handles security for an organisation like the DNC.