Hacking Computers for a Living

  Please join us this Friday morning when our speaker will be Aisling MacRunnels. Aisling has built a career in Silicon Valley by bringing an alternative mindset and synergistic voice to product development and technology businesses. She believes in the power of coupling emotional intelligence with IQ to enable better life and business decisions. As CMO/Head of Products at Sun Microsystems, Aisling led the initial deployment of Java on mobile clients (the start of the smartphone industry), and was responsible for the Java Developer Community as Java hit a record breaking billion downloads - a huge milestone at that time. She also played a major role in developing the first open source consortiums and licenses, a precursor to the crowdsourcing models we have today.  Aisling launched SunGrid, the first Cloud product. In the last few years Aisling has been working with Jay Kaplan and Mark Kuhr as a founding member and Chief Markets Officer of the Synack team. Together they have established a new category in cyber security, a platform that combines the best of human hacker-powered intelligence with artificial intelligence. The world's most elite ethical hackers are deployed to find vulnerabilities and rewarded based on the severity of the vulnerabilities found. Today the Synack hacker-powered platform is used to protect leading global banks, DoD sensitive assets, and close to $1 trillion in Fortune 500 revenue.

  Last year Aisling started Synack's Courageous Women in Security initiative, and since then has gathered hundreds of senior women in the security space at local events around the country to increase diversity in voice on the podium and support female leadership in the industry. Synack is proud of special programs around recruiting veterans and retraining their hacking skills, as well as a "Secure America" program offering States pro-bono hacking tests to secure election systems.