Katie Moussouris

Moussouris joined Symantec in October 2004 when they acquired @stake.[10][11] While there, she founded and managed Symantec Vulnerability Research in 2004, which was the first program to allow Symantec researchers to publish vulnerability research.[12]

In May 2007, Moussouris left Symantec to join Microsoft as a security strategist.[11] She founded the Microsoft Vulnerability Research (MSVR) program, announced at BlackHat 2008.[13] The program has coordinated the response to several significant vulnerabilities, including Dan Kaminsky's DNS flaw,[14] and has also actively looked for bugs in third-party software affecting Microsoft customers (subsequent examples of this include Google's Project Zero).

From September 2010 until May 2014, Moussouris was the Senior Security Strategist Lead at Microsoft, where she ran the Security Community Outreach and Strategy team for Microsoft as part of the Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC) team.[15] She instigated the Microsoft BlueHat Prize for Advancement of Exploit Mitigations,[16] which awarded over $260,000 in prizes to researchers at BlackHat USA 2012.[17] The grand prize of $200,000 was at the time the largest cash payout being offered by a software vendor.[18] She also created Microsoft's first bug bounty program,[1] which paid over $253,000 and received 18 vulnerabilities over the course of her tenure.

Moussouris has helped edit the ISO/IEC 29147 document since around 2008. In April 2016, ISO made the standard freely available at no charge after a request from Moussouris and the CERT Coordination Center's Art Manion.[19]

In May 2014, Moussouris was named the Chief Policy Officer at HackerOne, a vulnerability disclosure company based in San Francisco, California.[4] In this role, Moussouris was responsible for the company's vulnerability disclosure philosophy, and worked to promote and legitimize security research among organizations, legislators and policy makers.

While still at Microsoft, Moussouris began discussing a bug bounty program with the federal government; she continued these talks when she moved to HackerOne.[20] In March 2016, Moussouris was directly involved in creating the Department of Defense's "Hack the Pentagon" pilot program, organized and vetted by HackerOne.[21] It was the first bug bounty program in the history of the US federal government.[22]

Moussouris followed up the Pentagon program with "Hack the Air Force". HackerOne and Luta Security are partnering to deliver up to 20 bug bounty challenges over three years to the Defense Department.[23]

In April 2016,[24] Moussouris founded Luta Security,[25] a consultancy to help organizations and governments work collaboratively with hackers through bug bounty programs.

During 2015-2016 and 2016-2017, Katie Moussouris served as a Cybersecurity Fellow at New America, a U.S.-based think tank.[26][27]

In 2013, the Wassenaar Arrangement on Export Controls for Conventional Arms and Dual-Use Goods and Technologies was amended to include "intrusion software". Moussouris wrote an op-ed in Wired criticizing the move as harmful to the vulnerability disclosure industry due to the overly-broad definition and encouraged security experts to write in to help regulators understand how to make the right changes.[28] She was invited as a technical expert to directly assist in the US Wassenaar Arrangement negotiations, and helped rewrite the amendment to adopt end-use decontrol exemptions based on the intent of the user.[29]

Moussouris was a visiting scholar at the MIT Sloan School of Management and affiliate researcher at the Harvard Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, where she conducted economic research on the labor market for security bugs. She coauthored a book chapter on the first system dynamics model of the vulnerability economy and exploit market, published by MIT Press in 2017.[30][31]

In 2018, Moussouris testified in front of the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Consumer Protection, Product Safety, Insurance, and Data Security about security research for defensive purposes.[32]

In 2021, Moussouris testified in front of the U.S. House Committee on Science, Space, & Technology about improving the cybersecurity of software supply chains.[33]

In 2021, Moussouris donated $1 million dollars to found the Anuncia Donecia Songsong Manglona Lab for Gender and Economic Equity, at Penn State Law, named after her mother. The “Manglona Lab” will start with a gender equity litigation clinic intended to address workplace financial discrimination while promoting economic equity under the law.[34]