Window Snyder

Early Life and Education

Mwende Window Snyder was born in 1975 in New Jersey to an American father and a Kenyan-born mother, Wayua Muasa. She goes by her middle name, Window, with her first name used only by family members. She graduated from Choate Rosemary Hall in 1993 and subsequently attended Boston College, where she earned an undergraduate degree in computer science. During her studies she developed an interest in cryptography and cryptanalysis, and became actively involved in the Boston hacker community in the 1990s, building her own tools and gaining experience with multi-user systems. In the hacker scene she went by the nickname Rosie the Riveter. She has also served on the board of Choate Rosemary Hall.

Early Career

Snyder was among the first computer scientists to specialize in cybersecurity and to work proactively at bridging the gap between corporations and the security research community. She joined the security consultancy @stake as its tenth employee and rose to the position of director of security architecture before departing in 2002.

Microsoft

Following @stake, Snyder joined Microsoft as a senior security strategist in the Security Engineering and Communications group. In that role she contributed to the Security Development Lifecycle (SDL) and co-developed a new methodology for threat modeling software. She served as security lead and provided sign-off on Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 2 and Windows Server 2003. She also created the Blue Hat Microsoft Hacker Conference, an event designed to foster dialogue between Microsoft engineers and security researchers about the security of Microsoft's software. She left Microsoft in 2005.

Matasano Security and Mozilla

After leaving Microsoft, Snyder became a principal, founder, and CTO at Matasano Security, a security services and product company that was later acquired by NCC Group. She joined Mozilla Corporation in September 2006, where she worked on security until announcing her departure in December 2008, effective at the end of that year.

Apple, Fastly, Intel, and Square

On March 1, 2010, Snyder began work at Apple Inc. as a product manager responsible for the privacy and security of all Apple products. In 2015 she became chief security officer at Fastly, a content distribution network. In July 2018, Intel announced that Snyder would become chief security officer, vice president, and general manager of its Platforms Security Division within the Software and Services Group. In May 2019 she joined Square, Inc. as its top security officer.

Thistle Technologies

On April 22, 2021, Snyder announced the founding of Thistle Technologies, a company she described as providing a "secure foundation for devices."

Notable Work

Snyder co-authored Threat Modeling (Microsoft Press, 2004) with Frank Swiderski, a standard reference manual on application security. The book remains a foundational text in the field.

Public Appearances

Snyder has spoken at numerous industry conferences on topics including computer security challenges and the career paths of women in cybersecurity. Her appearances include keynote addresses at HITBSecConf in Amsterdam (April 2017), the Open Source Summit hosted by the Linux Foundation (August 2018), the RSA Conference (April 2018), and the Women in Tech Symposium at UC Berkeley (March 2020), as well as talks at Next Generation Threats in Stockholm and the O'Reilly Security Conference.