Dr. Hugh Thompson is Chief Technology Officer and Senior Vice President at Blue Coat. Also Blue Coat’s CMO, he has more than a decade of experience creating methodologies that help organizations build demonstrably more secure systems and has co-authored three books on the topic.
Dr. Herbert Hugh Thompson is a computer security expert and an Adjunct Professor in the Computer Science Department at Columbia University. He is also the Program Chairman of RSA Conference the world’s largest information security conference with over 25,000 attendees annually. Thompson is the co-author of a book on human achievement titled The Plateau Effect: Getting from Stuck to Success published by Penguin in 2013 and has co-authored three books on information security including, How to Break Software Security: Effective Techniques for Security Testing published by Addison-Wesley, and The Software Vulnerability Guide published by Charles River 2005. He is perhaps best known for his role in exposing electronic voting machine vulnerabilities as part of the HBO Documentary Hacking Democracy. He was named one of the “Top 5 Most Influential Thinkers in IT Security” by SC Magazine and has been referred to by the Financial Times as “One of the world’s foremost cryptology and internet security experts.”
Dr. Thompson has delivered talks/keynotes at key conferences and Fortune 500 corporations and writes frequently on the topic of information security. He has delivered a keynote presentation at every RSA Conference (US) since 2007 and has interviewed celebrities, experts, and even former presidents. Dr. Thompson has been interviewed by top news organizations including CNN, NPR, CNBC, ABC, Fox News, CBS Evening News, MSNBC, HBO, BusinessWeek, Forbes, Fortune, Associated Press, and the Washington Post. He has authored more than 80 academic and industrial publications on software security and writes for such industry publications as The New York Times, Scientific American, IEEE Security & Privacy, CSO Magazine, Network World and Forbes.
Dr. Thompson holds a B.S., M.S. and Ph.D. in applied mathematics from the Florida Institute of Technology. For the past few years he has been an adjunct professor at Columbia University, where he taught a graduate course that explored cutting edge techniques for secure software development and software vulnerability exploitation.
