Pukhraj Singh

Director

Pukhraj Singh is a cyber threat detection technologist with 15 years of experience. His background lies in interdisciplinary analysis bridging cyber threat intelligence, national security and geopolitics.

Pukhraj is a member of the Australian Institute of Professional Intelligence Officers. He is also a master’s student of cyber geostrategy at UNSW Canberra (Australian Defence Force Academy).

Pukhraj has held cyber security and intelligence roles at the National Technical Research Organisation (NTRO) under the Indian Prime Minister’s Office, Aadhaar, BAE Systems, Symantec, Verint and other crucial organisations.

At NTRO, he played a key role in establishing India’s strategic cyber defence capabilities. Pukhraj was also the first cyber security manager at Aadhaar, India’s flagship digital identification framework.

His strategic analysis has been published by the US Military Academy, Australian Defence College, Australian Strategic Policy Institute, Indian Army and Observer Research Foundation.

Pukhraj has spoken at international security conferences. He has trained senior Indian military commanders, advised the top national security echelon on charting India’s cyber doctrine, and participated in bilateral diplomatic dialogues.

He lives in Brisbane, Australia, with his wife and son.

Anand Venkatanaryanan

Director

Anand Venkatanaryanan is a cybersecurity and privacy researcher.

He is also a co-author of a critically acclaimed book on information warfare, The art of conjuring alternate realities: How information warfare shapes your world (HarperCollins) — which laid out in detail how modern day narrative dominance techniques work at scale by fusing Big Data powered Target Audience Acquisition and the A/B testing of appealing content via the Objective-Narrative-Campaign-Context-Content framework (ON3C).

He has two decades of experience and has worked in across multiple domains including telecom protocols, network engineering, device drivers for graphics chips, Linux device drivers for filesystems and storage management products

He is a public interest technologist and has written extensively about cybersecurity and privacy issues in several Indian publications including Medianama, Bloomberg Quint, The Quint, The Ken, The Business Standard, Hindustan Times, The Times of India, The Wire and Asia Times.

He was the first one to break the story of the hack of Kudankulam nuclear reactor in the public domain by the North Koreans using the D-track malware, and has written extensively about biometric identity systems and their vulnerabilities.

He was called as an expert witness before the Supreme Court of India in India’s digital identity (Aadhaar) case, the Pegasus case for petitioners who were infected by the malware, and has also deposed before the Kenyan High Court on their digital identity project called Huduma Namba.

Sara-Jayne Terp

Advisor

Sara-Jayne Terp has undertaken ground-breaking research in applying information security practices to defend against disinformation and other online harms, including extremism.

She has run large incident responses, set up response systems for election- and health-based cognitive security around the world, advise companies on disinformation risk management, and have built a body of research and tools for running and operating cognitive security operations centres, including the DISARM (formerly AMITT) frameworks for rapidly sharing disinformation data.

Sara-Jayne has taught cybersecurity and cognitive security at the University of Maryland and was a Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council. She was also involved in the development of an independent disinformation rating system with the Global Disinformation Index, served as the Chief Platform Architect for UN Global Pulse, and was an Adjunct Professor at Columbia University teaching Data Science for Development and Social Change among other courses.

She has master’s degrees in Artificial Intelligence, and Pattern Analysis and Neural Networks. Her technical background includes information fusion, crowdsourcing, unmanned systems (including human-machine teaming), data governance, nation-state development, and crisis response.

Check out this awesome profile of hers in the Wired magazine: One Data Scientist’s Quest to Quash Misinformation.