About

Tarah Wheeler is an information security executive, social scientist in the area of international conflict, author, and poker player. She is CEO of the cybersecurity compliance company Red Queen Dynamics.

Tarah serves as the Senior Fellow for Global Cyber Policy at Council on Foreign Relations and was elected to Life Membership at CFR in 2023. She is a member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Board of Directors, an IANS Research faculty member, and a Foreign Policy contributor on cyber warfare. She has been a US/UK Fulbright Scholar in Cyber Security and Fulbright Visiting Scholar at the Centre for the Resolution of Intractable Conflict at the University of Oxford, the Brookings Institution’s contributing cybersecurity editor, a Cyber Project Fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University‘s Kennedy School of Government, and an International Security Fellow at New America leading a new international cybersecurity capacity building project with the Hewlett Foundation’s Cyber Initiative. She is the author of the best-selling Women In Tech: Take Your Career to The Next Level With Practical Advice And Inspiring Stories. She has spoken and testified on information security at the United States Senate, European Union, at the Malaysian Securities Commission, at Los Alamos National Laboratory, for Foreign Policy, the OECD and FTC, at universities such as Stanford, American, West Point, and Oxford, and multiple governmental and industry conferences. She has been an inaugural contributing cybersecurity expert for the Washington Post, Head of Offensive Security & Technical Data Privacy at Splunk & Senior Director of Engineering and Principal Security Advocate at Symantec Website Security. She has led projects at Microsoft Game Studios (Halo and Lips) and architected systems at encrypted mobile communications firm Silent Circle. She has four cashes and $6110 in lifetime earnings in the World Series of Poker.

Projects:

I ran a Kickstarter to edit and produce Volney’s On Ruins to the world, and there’s more. My favorite French Enlightenment philosopher’s story is continuing.

Nerdlist–a list of admin and leet passwords from pop culture to be used for cracking. Pull requests and stories of victory welcomed 🙂

Yes, there was a hidden epic cryptographic puzzle story inside my book, “Women In Tech.”

Publications:

Foreign Policy Fall 2018–In Cyberwar, There are No Rules: Why the world desperately needs digital Geneva Conventions.

Women In Tech: Take Your Career To The Next Level With Practical Advice And Inspiring Stories, 2016, Penguin Random House

You can find me on Mastodon