Peter Cassidy

The Boston Globe article Theft at Monster alarms experts said

Scope of scam reveals new level of danger.
 
Security specialists say that the alleged theft of information of millions of users of the Monster.com job-hunting website shows how cunning and dangerous e-mail scammers have become.
 
“The phisher will look for any affinity between an institution or situation and a human being,” said Peter Cassidy, secretary-general of the Anti-Phishing Working Group in Cambridge. “They’ll find any relationship and mine it.”
 
Phishers have used a variety of methods to create the illusion of affinity. Millions of people have gotten messages purporting to come from the IRS that state the recipient is entitled to a tax refund. “Who doesn’t have a relationship with the Internal Revenue Service?” Cassidy said.

Peter Cassidy is the secretary general of the Anti-Phishing Working Group (APWG), the largest and most influential independent coalition combating Internet crime today, having cultivated the organization since 2004 into an internationally recognized authority on electronic crime with more than 3,200 members from more than 1,850 information technology companies, law enforcement agencies, government ministries, universities and research institutions worldwide.
 
Peter is a product development consultant, software designer, industrial analyst and widely published writer, speaker and commentator on information security, white collar crime and electronic crime who has been investigating the intersection of security technologies, electronic commerce, public policy and financial crime for decades in his many capacities.
 
His leadership of the APWG fortuitously enabled him to combine his interests to build bridges across the many disciplines and domains required for a single entity to comprehensively address the emerging electronic crime plexus. Today, the APWG embodies a uniquely heterogeneous global counter-crime association drawing upon the expertise of technologists, risk managers, private and public law enforcement and security personnel, government ministers, computer scientists and behavioral researchers.
 
Engaging all of these perspectives at once allows the APWG to narrate the experience of criminality emerging on the Internet in compelling and useful ways, including: statistical reports developed by the APWG’s members and sponsors; APWG member conferences; the annual APWG eCrime Research Summit conference for industrial and academic researchers; APWG member mailing lists; research and policy collaborations with governmental and industrial bodies; and APWG presentations at events sponsored by industry, government, law enforcement agencies and diplomatic organizations.
 
Speaking engagements on behalf of the APWG have brought Peter before audiences of industrial, governmental and law enforcement organizations in Korea, Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom, Singapore, France, Belgium, Japan, China, Portugal, Hong Kong, China and the United States. He is regularly interviewed by media from the US, Canada, Latin America, the United Kingdom, Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Australia, Japan, China and India.
 
He has presented to the European Commission, the Council of Europe, departments of the United States Treasury and Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI). He also lectures on electronic crime at the National Advocacy Center, the training center for US federal prosecutors.
 
As a business development consultant to both established and startup global technology firms, Peter has assisted in the design and development of security-related technologies and services (among them: a personal identity data abuse alerting system; license management systems to control software usage; watermarking systems for copyrighted digital intellectual property; and a system to distill actuarial proxies from network performance data as a basis for premium calculations in cyber-risk insurance policies).
 
Today, he sits on the boards of directors and technical advisory boards of a number of technology companies in investor and non-investor roles. His first startup was as a writer and editorial development consultant for a new publication at Reed Elsevier’s Sydney, Australia subsidiary in 1987.
 
His specific expertise and historical perspective in information security technologies have garnered him industrial analysis and custom consulting contracts with some of the most prestigious industrial research firms in America: Giga Information Group, Dataquest, Strategy Analytics, CI-InfoCorp, Business Research Group, Inc., a subsidiary of Cahners/Reed Elsevier and NSI Information Services. In 1995, he cofounded the Digital Commerce Society of Boston, a leading forum on innovations in electronic commerce technologies and then-emerging electronic payment paradigms.
 
As a technology writer and commentator, Peter has authored articles and opinion columns under his own byline for international business publications such as The Economist, Forbes ASAP and Wired magazine. In that role, journalists have interviewed and quoted him on such disparate topics as cryptography export policy and business-to-business customer acquisition costs.
 
In his capacity as an industrial analyst, he has spoken and given presentations on copyright management, license management, consumer privacy, distance learning and US cryptography export policies in the United Staes and Brazil. Moreover, he has contributed commentary to standards-making bodies and to the US Congress directly and under the auspices of his industrial clients.
 
As commentator on public policy and industrial technology policy, Peter’s articles and analyses have appeared in such journals of opinion as OMNI Magazine, The Covert Action Quarterly, CIO Magazine, InformationWeek and The Progressive as well as in the opinion pages of daily newspapers, such as The Boston Sunday Globe, and in the US weeklies that carried his columns via the AlterNet news service during the mid-1990s.
 
Moreover, his reporting on white collar crime, bank fraud, mortgage fraud and underwriting malfeasance have appeared in the Polk Award-winning National Mortgage News, Boston Magazine, The Texas Observer, Sunday Boston Herald and Boston Business Journal. His journalism has been supported by grants from the Fund for Constitutional Government and the Fund for Investigative Journalism. His articles have been anthologized in university collections and course books.
 
In the academic domain, Peter has been: a visiting fellow at MIT’s School of Architecture and Planning during the 2001–2002 school year, charged with development of a research program to quantify information risks that attend the construction of electronic commerce architectures; a visiting fellow at Florida State University’s School of Computer Science at Tallahassee during the 2006 school year, working with the staff in developing an academic research conference focusing on electronic crime, 2005 and 2006 school years; a guest lecturer on financial crime reporting to Boston University’s masters program in finance journalism, 1990, 1991, 1992, and 1993; an adjunct professor of non-fiction and industrial writing at Boston University’s College of Communications, 1990–1991 school year; associate lecturer of journalism at Bunker Hill Community College, 1990–1991; and guest lecturer on non-fiction writing to the Urban Scholars Program, University of Massachusetts at Boston, Summer, 1985.
 
Read his LinkedIn profile.