GitHub’s Jacob DePriest: How to attract and retain more diverse security talent

The Future of Security Operations

In this episode of Future of Security Operations, Thomas speaks with Jacob DePriest, VP & Deputy Chief Security Officer at GitHub, a company with a mission "to help every developer - regardless of experience level - learn, code, and ship software effectively."

Before joining GitHub, DePriest spent more than 15 years as a senior executive at the National Security Agency (NSA) in the US.

Topics include:

• How Jacob moved from a career deep in the engineering world to security

• His experience working at the NSA and why curiosity led him to move to GitHub to seek out a new adventure

• His experience with Open Source tools and why he believes in making tools that help the security community more widely available to handle threats

• How GitHub's security team prioritizes their workload, thinks about risk, and builds trust with their customers

• The vast amount of automation in place at GitHub, what they're building, and how they bring security findings as close to developers as they possibly can

• How the security team influences GitHub's product roadmap and why they want to be the first customer of any new feature

• His experience with Log4j and why he's proud of GitHub's response to the breach

• Why he prioritizes his team's psychological safety and thinks empathy, diversity, and transparency are critical to success for any security team

Resources:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jacobdepriest/

• Twitter: https://twitter.com/jacobdepriest