2015 STARS Hall of Fame

Alex Stamos

Chief Security Officer, Facebook
Bella Vista High School

Alex Stamos is the Chief Security Officer at Facebook, where he is responsible for the safety of the billions of people who use Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Oculus. He has dedicated his career to keeping the Internet safe for people worldwide.

Alex is proud to be a product of San Juan Unified School District and appreciates the top-notch education he received at Cambridge Heights Elementary, Arcade Middle and Bella Vista High School. His parents Charles and Florence Stamos (Mira Loma HS) were active volunteers every step of the way and fondly remember their days helping in the classroom. At Bella Vista, Alex played in the marching and jazz bands and was the captain of BV’s champion Academic Decathlon team.

Alex attended the University of California, Berkeley, graduating with a degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. He performed original research in distributed systems security for David Patterson’s research group and at the E.O. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and was a proud member of the Cal Band and Cal Sailing Team.

After his studies at Cal, Alex joined an early cloud computing startup, Loudcloud, rising through the company to eventually lead the security group. At the security consultancy @stake, he was able to work beside and learn from some of the greatest minds in the industry. In 2004, Alex joined with several friends to found iSEC Partners, a company dedicated to helping others build trustworthy systems. While at iSEC, Alex published groundbreaking research in cloud computing, smartphone security and the safety of the world’s most important forensics software. He led projects to secure companies including Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Charles Schwab, Goldman Sachs and Amazon.

By 2010, Alex and his partners had grown iSEC Partners into one of the most respected cybersecurity consultancies in the world, resulting in its acquisition by the largest security assurance company in the United Kingdom, NCC Group plc. After the acquisition, Alex formed and led an internal startup that would become NCC Domain Services, which now operates the .trust top-level domain as the safest neighborhood on the Internet. He holds three patents related to the design of secure Internet infrastructure.

In early 2014, Alex joined Yahoo as Chief Information Security Officer. He led Yahoo’s storied security team, the Yahoo Paranoids, to respond to the threats that faced Yahoo in the post-Snowden era. In June 2015, joined Facebook, where he took responsibility for the safety of billions of users and the security of the world’s most popular online destination.

Alex has long fought to protect civil liberties online as an expert witness for the Electronic Frontier Foundation and several famously persecuted security researchers, including George Hotz and Aaron Swartz. Alex was the main organizer of the Trustworthy Technology Conference, and he has continued to stand against those who would arrogate the Internet to create a tool for surveillance and repression. He has spoken out on these issues in the pages of the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and in testimony in front of the United States Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.

While at Bella Vista, Alex was incredibly fortunate to be cross-examined by a Mock Trial attorney named Katie Plath, the daughter of beloved Fair Oaks Elementary teacher Nancy Plath and her husband Rich.