GitHub’s Jacob DePriest: How to attract and retain more diverse security talent

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Written by Thomas KinsellaCo-founder & CCO, Tines

In this episode of Future of Security Operations, Thomas speaks with Jacob DePriest, VP & Deputy Chief Security Officer at GitHub, a company with a mission "to help every developer - regardless of experience level - learn, code, and ship software effectively."

Before joining GitHub, DePriest spent more than 15 years as a senior executive at the National Security Agency (NSA) in the US.

Topics include: 

  • How Jacob moved from a career deep in the engineering world to security

  • His experience working at the NSA and why curiosity led him to move to GitHub to seek out a new adventure

  • His experience with open-source software and why he believes in making tools that help the security community more widely available to handle threats

  • How GitHub's security team prioritizes their workload, thinks about risk, and builds trust with their users

  • The vast amount of automation in place at GitHub, what they're building, and how they bring security findings as close to developers as they possibly can

  • How the security team influences GitHub's product roadmap and why they want to be the first customer of any new feature

  • His experience with Log4j and why he's proud of GitHub's response to the breach

  • Why he prioritizes his team's psychological safety and thinks empathy, diversity, and transparency are critical to success for any security team

Resources: 

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