Winn Schwartau

Early Life

Born on July 1, 1952, Schwartau grew up in a household shaped by audio engineering. His father, Bill Schwartau, was an audio engineer and producer, and his mother, Mary Caroline Bell, was the first female audio engineer at NBC during World War II. At the age of 16, Schwartau began his own professional audio-video career, working at prominent studios in New York including Mirasound Studios, A&R Recording with producer Phil Ramone, The Hit Factory, and Electric Lady Studios. Between 1978 and 1981, he engineered 96 live concert broadcasts from The Lone Star Cafe.

Career

Schwartau transitioned from audio-video work into computer security, eventually becoming one of the field's most recognized voices. In 1991, he testified before Congress and coined the term "Electronic Pearl Harbor" to describe the potential consequences of a large-scale cyberattack on the United States — a phrase that entered the broader national security lexicon. He has consistently advocated for greater emphasis on computer security at the governmental and private-sector levels, recalling that some of his early warnings were not taken seriously despite what he viewed as demonstrable threats.

Schwartau founded InfowarCon in 1994, one of the earliest conferences dedicated to information warfare. He also founded Trusted Learning in 2003 and co-founded SCIPP International in 2007. He served as Chairman of the Board of Mobile Active Defense, a firm specializing in security and compliance for smartphones and tablets. He was president and founder of The Security Awareness Company (formerly Interpact, Inc.), which developed security awareness programs for public and private organizations; the company was sold to KnowBe4 in 2017. Following the acquisition, Schwartau took on the role of Chief Visionary Officer for SAC Labs, a division of KnowBe4.

Notable Work

Schwartau's written output spans fiction and non-fiction across several decades. His 1991 novel Terminal Compromise depicted a cyber-terrorist attack on the United States using 1980s technology and was later updated and republished in 2001 as Pearl Harbor Dot Com. His first non-fiction work, Information Warfare: Chaos on the Electronic Superhighway, published in 1994 with subsequent editions in 1996 and 1997, examined cyberterrorism and cyberwar as they pertained to governments and the private sector. Cybershock (2000, 2001) offered a non-technical examination of hackers, information warriors, and offensive cyber capabilities.

In Time Based Security, Schwartau introduced mathematical principles for using time as a primary security metric. He also authored Internet and Computer Ethics for Kids (and Parents and Teachers Without a Clue) (2001/2002), which security researcher Dr. Fred Cohen described as "the best security book ever written." His most recent major work, Analogue Network Security, formalized the mathematics behind creating provably secure cyber and physical environments and was named "the Best CyberSecurity Book of all Time" by Cyber Defense Magazine in February 2021.

Recognition

Schwartau has received numerous honors throughout his career. In 2002, Network World named him one of the 50 most powerful people in networking and honored him as a "Power Thinker." SC Magazine labeled him one of the Top 5 Security Thinkers in 2007 and has referred to him as the "civilian architect of information warfare." In 2008, Security Magazine voted him one of the 25 Most Influential People in the Security Industry. In 2019, he was inducted into the ISSA International Hall of Fame and ranked 66th out of approximately 42,000 attendees on the Top 100 Cybersecurity Influencers list at RSA Conference.

Legacy

Schwartau holds fellowships with the Royal Society of the Arts and the Ponemon Institute. His early warnings about the vulnerabilities of networked systems, delivered at a time when such concerns were largely dismissed, helped lay the conceptual groundwork for the field of information warfare as it is understood today.