Wendy Nather is a nonresident senior fellow at the Cyber Statecraft Initiative under the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab) and leads the Advisory CISO team at Cisco. She was previously research director at the Retail Information Sharing and Analysis Center, where she was responsible for advancing the state of resources and knowledge to help organizations defend their infrastructure from attackers. Nather was also research director of the Information Security Practice at independent analyst firm 451 Research, covering the security industry in areas such as application security, threat intelligence, security services, and other emerging technologies.

Nather has served as a CISO in both the private and public sectors. She led IT security for the EMEA region of the investment banking division of Swiss Bank Corporation (now the Union Bank of Switzerland), as well as for the Texas Education Agency. Nather is co-author of The Cloud Security Rules, and she was listed as one of SC Magazine‘s women in IT security “power players” in 2014, as well as an “influencer” in the Reboot Leadership Awards in 2018; she was also inducted into the Infosecurity Europe Hall of Fame in 2021. She is an advisory board member for the RSA Conference, and serves on the advisory board for Sightline Security, an organization that helps provide free security assessment services to nonprofit groups. Nather is a senior cybersecurity fellow at the Robert Strauss Center for International Security and Law at the University of Texas at Austin, and is based in Austin, Texas.