Vanessa Thomas (all pronouns)

Senior Advisor, Technology Review, Government of Canada

Dr. Vanessa Thomas, CIPT (all pronouns), is an award-winning technologist, designer, and researcher with a background that spans computer science, mathematics, privacy engineering, human security, peace building, leadership, feminist studies, and public policy analysis, amongst other topics. During their career, Vanessa has been privileged enough to live and work in Ecuador, Bolivia, the United States of America, the United Kingdom, Denmark, and a couple of provinces in Canada. While Vanessa has worked for the Government of Canada since 2019, they have also maintained a presence in academia. Vanessa teaches part-time with Carleton University's School of Information Technology and sits on the Advisory Board for the National Research Council’s Digital Technology Research Centre; they have also published over a dozen peer-reviewed papers and book chapters.

Sessions

Resiliency

Building cyber resilience: Challenges and opportunities facing Canada's digital transformation

October 25, 202410:50 AM EDT – 11:20 AM EDT

Lord Elgin [Ontario Room]

Every day, institutions in Canada fall victim to cyber attacks. For many of those institutions, recovering from data breaches is a difficult and costly path. For example, it took over six months for the Toronto Public Library to recover from its 2023 ransomware attack, and the recovery costs were estimated at nearly $1 million. The City of Hamilton was also hit by a ransomware attack in February 2024, and was See More.