Hacking the Hacker

44Profile: Eva Galperin

You’ve got to love a person who likes computers and cybersecurity and spends their free time hanging out performing aerial acrobatics at circuses for a hobby. The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s (https://www.eff.org) Director of Cybersecurity, Eva Galperin, is such a person. Working for EFF since 2007, she became their Director of Cybersecurity in 2017. Prior to EFF, she earned degrees in political science and international relations from San Francisco State University. Her work primarily focuses on providing privacy, free speech, and security for everyone around the world, along with examining malware that threatens the same. Galperin is now known around the world for her work in the field, writing about the malware she has come across, and speaking at security conferences like BlackHat (https://www.blackhat.com/us‐16/speakers/Eva‐Galperin.html).

I asked Galperin how she got into computer security, and she replied, “I got into computers fairly early. My dad was a computer security guy and I asked him about hanging out on Prodigy [a precursor of AOL and other online services]. Instead, he created me a desktop on his Unix/Solaris computer. Age 12 … on a Unix machine, can you imagine? I was in the Usenet discussion areas about science fiction books, playing interactive text games, and when the web came along I got into building web pages. I put myself through college as a Unix system administrator, and back then being a sys admin meant it included computer ...