We are pleased to announce the judges for the Apps 4 Digital Peace competition, which includes the Cybersecurity Tech Accord, United Nations Office for Disarmament Affairs, and the Secretary General’s Envoy on Youth. Our judges are leaders from across the technology industry, media, and the foreign policy community and include:
- Richard Marko
- Damir “Gaus” Rajnovic
- Alex Stamos
- Liis Vihul
- Kim Zetter
- Jayathma Wickramanayake
As we hope to encourage young minds around the world to find solutions to promote an open, secure, stable, and accessible online environment, this esteemed panel of judges will assess each submission on their potential to increase online stability and reduce the occurrence of the malicious use of cyberspace. In particular, technology-based solutions should aim to address one of the following topics:
- Address existing and potential cyber threats;
- Ensure respect for international law in cyberspace;
- Ensure respect for human rights in cyberspace;
- Promote adherence to voluntary norms, rules and principles;
- Foster confidence building;
- Enhance cybersecurity capacity building.
The submissions should include a technical element, whether that be a mobile app, hardware product, code, or others. A complete description of the rules of the contest, including how to submit entries, is available HERE. If your question is not addressed there, email us at [email protected] or contact us through Twitter (@cybertechaccord). We will not only respond to you but will also ensure that these inquiries are captured on the site in the FAQs section for others to find answers to similar questions.
And remember the deadline – even if you have not registered before – is 30th July 2020!
Finalists will be announced in September.
Meet the Judges
Richard Marko
Richard Marko has been CEO of ESET since January 2011; before that, he was the company’s Chief Technology Officer from 2008 to 2010. As CEO he has overseen the deployment of ESET’s new generation of products for consumers and business, and major global growth ESET has witnessed as a result.
Richard was one of the co-designers of ESET’s award-winning antivirus system and its proprietary scanning engine, released for the first time in 1995. In 1998, as Chief Software Architect, he co-designed ESET’s NOD32 technology for the next generation of products, and then oversaw the deployment of ESET’s new flagship consumer product – ESET Smart Security – in 2007. He designed ESET’s Advanced Heuristics, which in 2002 delivered a technological breakthrough in malware detection. Thanks to this technology, ESET is now a world leader in IT security.
He began his career at ESET while still a student at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Information Systems, Košice Technical University, Slovakia; he graduated in 1996 with a Master’s of Science with Distinction, and his dissertation won the Rector’s Award.
Damir “Gaus” Rajnovic
Damir “Gaus” Rajnovic currently serves as a Cybersecurity Manager for the EU region at Panasonic, where he began working in 2012. As part of his duties, he helps formulate Panasonic’s policies and strategies related to security and privacy. He also advises internally on possible effects of new and upcoming legislation in the EU and the US.
He began his active involvement in computer security in 1993 and continued fueling his passion through participation in the FIRST Forum in 1994. Over the years, he has remained active within the organization through serving on the FIRST Steering Committee and as a Board Director. Within FIRST, he also founded a Vendor Special Interest Group (SIG), which gathers teams from some of the world’s most recognized vendors, including Microsoft, Apple, Ericsson, IBM, Cisco and Oracle.
Gaus was also one of the original group who established the Industry Consortium for the Advanced of Security on the Internet (ICASI) and formed the Croatian Academic and Educational Network (CARNet) CERT. In addition, he wrote a book entitled Computer Incident Response and Product Security and even served as a lecturer for the MSc Information Technology Security course at Westminster University.
Alex Stamos
Alex Stamos is a cybersecurity expert, business leader and entrepreneur working to improve the security and safety of the Internet through his teaching and research at Stanford University. Alex is an Adjunct Professor at Stanford’s Freeman-Spogli Institute and a visiting scholar at the Hoover Institution.
Prior to joining Stanford, Alex served as the Chief Security Officer of Facebook. In this role, he led a team of engineers, researchers, investigators and analysts charged with understanding and mitigating information security risks to the company and safety risks to the 2.5 billion people on Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. Before joining Facebook, Alex was the Chief Information Security Officer at Yahoo, rebuilding a storied security team while dealing with multiple assaults by nation-state actors. While at Yahoo, he led the company’s response to the Snowden disclosures by implementing massive cryptographic.
In 2004, Alex co-founded iSEC Partners, an elite security consultancy known for groundbreaking work in secure software development, embedded and mobile security. As a trusted partner to world’s largest technology firms, Alex coordinated the response to the “Aurora” attacks by the People’s Liberation Army at multiple Silicon Valley firms and led groundbreaking work securing the world’s largest desktop and mobile platforms.
Liis Vihul
Liis Vihul is the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Cyber Law International, a firm that provides international cyber law training and consulting services for governments and international organizations worldwide. Previously, she spent nine years as a senior analyst in the Law and Policy Branch at the NATO Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence. She was a member of the Estonian delegation at the United Nations Group of Governmental Experts on Information and Telecommunications in the Context of International Security (2014-15 and 2016-17), and advises the Estonian Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the current 2019-21 UN GGE process. Liis holds master’s degrees in law from the University of Tartu and information security from the University of London.
Kim Zetter
Kim Zetter is an award-winning investigative journalist and author who has covered cybersecurity, national security, privacy and civil liberties issues since 1999, most recently as a staff writer for WIRED, where she wrote for more than a decade. Her work has also appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Politico, and The Washington Post, among others.
Kim has broken numerous stories about NSA surveillance, WikiLeaks, and the hacker underground, including an award-winning series about security problems with electronic voting machines. She has been voted one of the top ten security journalists in the U.S. four times by her journalism peers and security professionals. Additionally, Kim is one of the world’s experts on Stuxnet, a virus/worm used to sabotage Iran’s nuclear program and wrote a highly-acclaimed book on the topic – Countdown to Zero Day: Stuxnet and the Launch of the World’s First Digital Weapon.
Jayathma Wickramanayake
Jayathma Wickramanayake was appointed as the UN Secretary-General’s Envoy on Youth in June 2017 at the age of 26. In this role, Jayathma works to expand the UN’s youth engagement and advocacy efforts across all four pillars of work – sustainable development, human rights, peace and security and humanitarian action – and serves as a representative of and advisor to the Secretary-General.
Originally from Sri Lanka, Jayathma has worked extensively on youth development and participation, and has played a key role in transforming the youth development sector in her home country.
Prior to taking up her post, Jayathma was instrumental in creating the movement for civic and political engagement of young people, especially young women in Sri Lanka named “Hashtag Generation”. Previously, she advocated for global youth development on an international level and served as the first ever Sri Lankan Youth Delegate to the United Nations, as well as the youth lead negotiator and member of the International Youth Task Force of the World Conference on Youth 2014, where she played a critical role in mainstreaming youth in the Post-2015 Process, and in the establishment of World Youth Skills Day.