Apps 4 Digital Peace: Meet the judges

Damir “Gaus” Rajnovic

Damir “Gaus” Rajnovic currently serves as a Cybersecurity Manager for the EU region at Panasonic, where he began working in 2012. As part of his duties, he helps formulate Panasonic’s policies and strategies related to security and privacy. He also advises internally on possible effects of new and upcoming legislation in the EU and the US.

He began his active involvement in computer security in 1993 and continued fueling his passion through participation in the FIRST Forum in 1994. Over the years, he has remained active within the organization through serving on the FIRST Steering Committee and as a Board Director. Within FIRST, he also founded a Vendor Special Interest Group (SIG), which gathers teams from some of the world’s most recognized vendors, including Microsoft, Apple, Ericsson, IBM, Cisco and Oracle.

Gaus was also one of the original group who established the Industry Consortium for the Advanced of Security on the Internet (ICASI) and formed the Croatian Academic and Educational Network (CARNet) CERT. In addition, he wrote a book entitled Computer Incident Response and Product Security and even served as a lecturer for the MSc Information Technology Security course at Westminster University. 

Alex Stamos is a cybersecurity expert, business leader and entrepreneur working to improve the security and safety of the Internet through his teaching and research at Stanford University. Alex is an Adjunct Professor at Stanford’s Freeman-Spogli Institute and a visiting scholar at the Hoover Institution.

Prior to joining Stanford, Alex served as the Chief Security Officer of Facebook. In this role, he led a team of engineers, researchers, investigators and analysts charged with understanding and mitigating information security risks to the company and safety risks to the 2.5 billion people on Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. Before joining Facebook, Alex was the Chief Information Security Officer at Yahoo, rebuilding a storied security team while dealing with multiple assaults by nation-state actors. While at Yahoo, he led the company’s response to the Snowden disclosures by implementing massive cryptographic.

In 2004, Alex co-founded iSEC Partners, an elite security consultancy known for groundbreaking work in secure software development, embedded and mobile security. As a trusted partner to world’s largest technology firms, Alex coordinated the response to the “Aurora” attacks by the People’s Liberation Army at multiple Silicon Valley firms and led groundbreaking work securing the world’s largest desktop and mobile platforms.

Liis Vihul is the Chief Executive Officer of Cyber Law International, a firm that provides international cyber law training and consulting services for governments and international organizations worldwide. She also serves as an Ambassador of the NATO Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence and is a co-managing editor of the Woomera Manual on International Law Applicable to Conflict in Outer Space and Deputy Chair for Law of the Global Commission on the Stability of Cyberspace’s Research Advisory Group. In 2014-15 and 2016-17, she was a member of the Estonian delegation at the United Nations Group of Governmental Experts on Information and Telecommunications in the Context of International Security.

Previously, she spent nine years as a senior analyst in the Law and Policy Branch at the NATO Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence and was the managing editor of the Tallinn Manual 2.0 on the International Law Applicable to Cyber Operations. Liis also served as a member of the Law and Policy Branch in 2008-2017. Her work focused on public international law, which included serving as the managing editor of the Tallinn Manual 2.0 on the International Law Applicable to Cyber Operations, co-directing the Centre’s International Law of Cyber Operations course, and developing the concept for Locked Shields exercise’s legal play.

Liis holds master’s degrees in law from the University of Tartu and information security from the University of London. In 2016, she was awarded the Golden Badge of the Estonian Ministry of Defence for her work in international cyber law.

Kim Zetter is an award-winning investigative journalist and author who has covered cybersecurity, national security, privacy and civil liberties issues since 1999, most recently as a staff writer for WIRED, where she wrote for more than a decade. Her work has also appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Politico, and The Washington Post, among others.

Kim has broken numerous stories about NSA surveillance, WikiLeaks, and the hacker underground, including an award-winning series about security problems with electronic voting machines. She has been voted one of the top ten security journalists in the U.S. four times by her journalism peers and security professionals. Additionally, Kim is one of the world’s experts on Stuxnet, a virus/worm used to sabotage Iran’s nuclear program and wrote a highly-acclaimed book on the topic – Countdown to Zero Day: Stuxnet and the Launch of the World’s First Digital Weapon.