CISA names former DNC official as a senior advisor

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency announced Monday that Bob Lord, a digital security veteran, would join the organization as a senior technical advisor.

Lord previously served as the Democratic National Committee’s first chief information security officer from 2018 to 2021. He is widely credited with rebuilding the organization’s online defenses after hackers infiltrated the DNC during the 2016 presidential election in a breach that U.S. intelligence officials blamed on Russia.

The DNC was not hacked during the 2018 midterms or the 2020 presidential election. Lord and his colleagues trained committee staff and state parties to spot potential cyber threats by, among other things, regularly conducting simulated phishing campaigns to test employees’ vigilance.

“Bob’s decades of experience and unparalleled expertise will be a great asset as we further strengthen our community partnerships, expand the Joint Cyber Defense Collaborative, and continue our work as the nation’s cyber defense agency to make us more resilient,” CISA Director Jen Easterly said in a statement.

“Bob and I share both a passion for helping Americans stay safe online and a dedication to raising the cybersecurity baseline across the nation. I’m super excited for the creativity he’ll bring to the team,” she added.

Prior to joining the DNC, Lord was Yahoo’s chief information security officer from 2015 to 2017. There he shepherded the internet giant through two massive data breaches. A 2014 breach compromised the data of more than 500 million users and eventually led to an indictment in 2017 of three Russians and one Canadian. 

A second breach, which Yahoo claimed took place in August 2013, exposed the information all three billion of the users it had at the time. 

Before Yahoo, Lord worked as an independent security consultant and as Twitter’s first director of information security.

“As we face a pivotal moment in time for cybersecurity, I’m thrilled to contribute my experience to support CISA’s efforts to reduce risk to critical infrastructure, strengthen its collaboration with industry and make basic cyber practices accessible to all Americans,” Lord, who will advise CISA’s Cybersecurity Division, said in a statement.