In 1999, Barak was part of the Israeli team that helped the FBI identify and eventually arrest Ehud Tenenbaum, the infamous hacker known simply as Analyzer.

 

A little more than 2 years later he was appointed Head of Security (or CSO) for Webex, before its acquisition by Cisco. In 2002, Barak helped co-conspirator Neal O’Farrell to launch Think Security First!

Think Security First was America’s first cyber secure city and an ambitious program to raise the security awareness of an entire city (Walnut Creek, California, population 64,000). Partners in the initiative include Microsoft, Cisco, McAfee, AT&T, and the Department of Homeland Security.

He’s perhaps best known for pioneering the concept of the virtual (or fractional) Chief Information Security Officer model nearly two decades ago, a history he explores in his books “Why CISOs Fail” and “The Security Hippie”.

Over the twenty years since then, Barak has led the security efforts of countless and diverse organizations, including MuleSoft, Amplitude Analytics, Livenation/Ticketmaster, StubHub, Barnes and Noble, bebe Stores and many others.

His company, EAmmune, manages security programs across many such companies – he was CISO and Chief Privacy Officer for MuleSoft just prior to its $6.5 billion acquisition by Salesforce, and has seen StubHub as its CISO through the company’s $4B acquisition by ViaGoGo and its massive digital transformation project.

Barak’s first exposure to the world of cybersecurity was as a teenager, when he experimented with technology in ways that ultimately became recognized as hacking. Later, in the 1990s he became more formally introduced to the field as a student at the world-renowned Technion Institute of Technology in Haifa, Israel.