Kyla Guru

Founder/CEO of Bits N’ Bytes Cybersecurity Education and GirlCon Conferences, Gen Z Cybersecurity Leader & Social Entrepreneur

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Biography

Kyla is 20 years old and already reimagining the future of cybersecurity, digital privacy, and AI. When she was 14 years old, Kyla discovered her passion for human-centered security, discovering that 90% of cyberattacks were due to human error. To combat this, Kyla founded Bits N’ Bytes Cybersecurity Education Corp (BNBCE), an international 501(c)(3) that distributes curriculum to 1,000+ schools and sustains partnerships with corporations like Facebook and IBM, and educational platforms to increase training/awareness in cybersecurity and privacy. Kyla has recently expanded this mission to India, where she led an initiative to bring cybersecurity workshops and resources to 300 students across the Southern region of the country. Kyla has also connected with students and educators across Singapore, Indonesia, and the Philippines, and more. Read More >

Kyla has seen first-hand how online threats can intimately affect lives, gaining expertise in cybersecurity across threat intelligence, offensive hacking, and security engineering at Apple, Facebook, various nonprofits, and the U.S. Government. She has championed her message for empowering individuals in cyber on national and international stages including TEDxChicago, NIST’s NICE Conference, Tableau’s DataCon, RSAC-USA, and RSAC-Singapore. She is also the co-founder of GirlCon Tech, an international annual conference that unites 1,000+ industry professionals and students annually to discuss bridging the gender gap.

For her impact-driven work, Kyla has been honored as Crain Chicago’s Top 50 in Tech, a Stanford She++ fellow, a 2018 Global Teen Leader, and a 2019 Harvard Book Prize Award winner. Kyla is also a student at Stanford University studying Computer Science and International Security with Honors. Kyla has also led several Stanford teams to international and national victory, including Cyber 9/12 Strategy Challenge, the Collegiate Penetration Testing Competition, and the Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition. Read Less ^

Speaker Videos

Speaker Reel

Hacking a Solution to Global Cybercrime | Kyla Guru | TEDxChicago

Tales of a Teenage Security Supergirl

RSA-APJ Speech

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Speech Topics

Personal Security

Kyla will teach about protecting yourself online in an era of "Cyber-Insecurity,” giving resources to navigate personal cybersecurity in the face of the advancing cybersecurity threat landscape. She will provide a holistic scope of threats (threat vectors, APT groups, specific scams) facing each demographic at hand--whether the audience is children, parents, educators, executives, and more. She will speak about threat actors, their motivations, and how vulnerable demographics are targeted not only based on age, but also based on gender and race. Kyla will share stories from her deep dives into the Dark Web to hunt for cybercriminal forums and PII information, including greatest takeaways and lessons to keep yourself safe.

Gen-Z & the Next Generation of Cyber + Women in Cybersecurity

Together, Generation Z represents over $143 billion dollars in annual purchasing power. Kyla will use her unique perspective as a Gen Z, going through the education system to talk about what she sees for the future of cybersecurity education for youth, and, of course, strategies on how your organization can make radical change in empowering future generations. For educators and executives, Kyla will share a “toolkit” for introducing cybersecurity and privacy with the younger generation, and specific strategies that can be used to attract a new, diverse generation of talent in the workforce. Specifically, Kyla will focus on why cybersecurity is such a high-impact area and how “gen-zennials” are well-fit and well-prepared to meet future cybersecurity workforce needs.

The Role of AI in Cybersecurity

In the age of ChatGPT and generative AI models, Artificial Intelligence can now be used as our greatest tool to detect anomalistic behavior in dynamic threat environments--but it can also be our most intelligent adversary. Kyla will speak to the implications of AI to launch disinformation campaigns, the rise of deepfake technology (and its disproportionate impact on women and marginalized populations), and the potential use of AI for threat emulation, penetration-testing/offensive hacking, and reconnaissance.

International Security & Threat Intelligence

Sharing insights from her time at CISA and Apple Security Operations, Kyla will break down the international threat landscape by providing an in-depth analysis of the biggest players affecting the US. She will enrich the session with case-study examples and dive into motives and threats that could directly affect your business vertical. As Kyla does in every session, she will provide recommendations for strengthening security posture and skating ahead of the puck against the adversaries.