Meet Window Snyder, the trailblazer who helped secure the internet and billions of devices | TechCrunch
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Meet Window Snyder, a veteran hacker and cybersecurity pro who has helped companies like Microsoft, Mozilla, and Apple be more secure.

“For 25 years, Window has been quietly changing the security industry with her pioneering work at Apple, Mozilla, Fastly, and Intel, among others.

“She basically revolutionized security for the entire internet with her work [at Microsoft],” Katie Moussouris says.

For years, people have been telling me about Window Snyder, saying she never got the credit she deserved for her work at Microsoft and Apple.

Today, we finally reveal how important she was in enabling encryption by default on Macs, iPhones, and iMessage.”

  • AutoTL;DR@lemmings.worldBEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:

    There, as part of a project she called “Apple Doesn’t Have Your Data,” she successfully lobbied and worked on enabling encryption by default in all Apple-made computers, iPhones and iPads, and iMessage, helping lay the foundations for the company’s reputation as a cybersecurity giant.

    Those who know her or have worked with her call Snyder “trailblazing,” “intelligent,” “impressive,” “technical,” “brilliant,” “driven,” “thoughtful,” “relentless,” “remarkable,” “wicked smart,” “professional,” a “leader,” “humble,” and “like a swan — so graceful on the surface, but paddling like hell underneath.”

    “I was a little stunned at first, not understanding what it was she was asking for; I’d heard VAX and was thinking about one of the huge ones still back at the L0pht, and she didn’t quite match the ripped jeans, dirty t-shirt, and black-leather-jacket cyberpunk aesthetic of most of the other people at The Flea,” he wrote.

    Clyde Rodriguez, who headed the engineering effort for the Windows XP Professional x64 Edition operating system and the war room meetings, says Snyder “was one of the most critical partners” that he had in that project, because he had a “high degree of trust in her judgment.”

    “That focus on user level security,” which is now front and center at Apple and Google in terms of what they do with iOS and Android, Callas says, “that mode of thought goes back to the sorts of things that she was pushing” in the late 2000s and early 2010s.

    Lodrina Cherne, a forensics instructor at the cybersecurity training organization SANS, and who is a woman of color, remembers finally meeting Snyder in 1999 at the hacking conference Def Con in Las Vegas after having heard a lot about her online.

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