bio

Dr. Carrie Gates joined Bank of America in October 2018 as a Senior Vice President in Global Information Security. She is establishing a research program, working in partnership with universities to pursue longer term, higher risk research in the security space that has the potential to improve the bank's security posture. Her current portfolio includes voice authentication, usable security metrics, cyber risk metrics, adversarial machine learning and insider threat.

Prior to joining the bank, Carrie was the co-founder and CTO for Securelytix, an early-stage start-up based in the Boston area. She has also been a Senior Distinguished Engineer and Chief Scientist with Dell Research and a Distinguished Engineer and Director of Research for CA Labs, the research arm for CA Technologies.

Dr. Gates has over 50 peer-reviewed publications and more than 20 awarded patents in the computer and network security field. Outside of work, she enjoys horseback riding and traveling.

Why did you get into cybersecurity?

I came into security somewhat by accident. I started my career as a systems administrator, with security as one of my responsibilities. During this time there were some key security events that helped me to realize that I enjoyed determining how to best defend systems. This spilled over into my PhD, where I ended up focusing on security.

What cybersecurity issue is monopolizing most of your time or are you most concerned about?

I am most concerned about the ease with which people are able to create fake video and audio, and our current lack of infrastructure and capabilities for detecting or preventing these fakes.

Carrie's Cybersecurity Tip

I'm assuming that your readers are also in the cybersecurity space, in which case my tip is that we, as professionals, should work with end users so they can complete their primary task without needing to understand anything about security.