Thomas Glocer, a 1984 graduate of Yale Law School, has been helping to fend off cyber attacks for nearly two decades. As the CEO of Thomson Reuters from 2001 through 2011, his firm’s trading platforms were a target that needed to be secured. His fascination with the multi-faceted demands of cybersecurity grew while chairing the committee responsible for technology on Morgan Stanley’s board of directors. Today, Glocer is the co-founder and executive chairman of the cyber defense firm BlueVoyant. In a conversation with Yale Insights, he discussed cybersecurity, and its limits, as well as a radically new model for privacy and protection of the data we all create as participants in today’s digital world.
Q: How did you get into cyber defense?
Cyber defense brings together issues that interest me—compelling technological challenges and a geopolitical overlay where foreign-state actors might want to compromise not only government and military systems but financial services, the power grid, etc.
When I ran Thomson Reuters from 2001 to 2011, we were subject to significant amounts of electronic probing, in part because of the electronic trading systems we operated…
