Tyler Cohen Wood
Boards now own cyber risk in a way they did not a decade ago, and most are not equipped for it. Threat actors are using AI to industrialise social engineering, deepfakes and intrusion at a pace that outruns existing controls. Executives need someone fluent in both the intelligence-grade threat picture and the commercial reality of running a business through it.
Tyler Cohen Wood is a former US Defense Intelligence Agency Senior Intelligence Officer who helps boards and executive teams treat cybersecurity, AI and emerging tech as a strategic capability rather than a compliance function.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Tyler Cohen Wood
- She brings the threat picture a board actually needs: thirteen years inside the Department of Defense, including roles as Deputy Cyber Division Chief at the DIA and the Directorate’s named Cyber Subject Matter Expert, translated into language a non-technical executive can act on.
- She has run cyber risk at commercial scale. As Director of Cyber Risk Management at AT&T she built defences across one of the largest customer bases in the world, so her advice maps onto P&L decisions, not just policy.
- She is operator, not pundit. As co-founder of Dark Cryptonite (patent-pending zero-trust encryption) and CEO of MyConnectedHealth (AI in clinical diagnostics), she is currently building in the two domains she speaks on.
- Her work on social engineering and deepfakes draws on a digital forensics career at NASA’s Office of Inspector General and the DoD Cyber Crime Center, where she investigated major crimes and intrusions. That gives the deepfake material specific case grounding rather than headline commentary.
- She holds multiple US provisional patents for cyber capabilities and is a regular expert voice on Good Morning America, CNN, The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg, so she lands in front of executive audiences who recognise her from crisis coverage.
Biography highlights
- Former Senior Intelligence Officer and Deputy Cyber Division Chief, Special Communications Division, US Defense Intelligence Agency.
- Former Director of Cyber Risk Management, AT&T.
- Co-founder, Dark Cryptonite (patent-pending zero-trust encryption); Founder and CEO, MyConnectedHealth Inc.
- Author of Catching the Catfishers (Career Press); co-author of Alternate Data Storage Forensics (Syngress).
- Holder of multiple US provisional patents for cyber capabilities.
- Regular commentator for Good Morning America, CNN, The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, and GovInfoSecurity.
Biography
The cyber threat picture has changed shape. Adversaries now use generative AI to scale phishing, clone executive voices and produce convincing video. The defensive vocabulary that worked in 2018, perimeter, patch, password, no longer covers the surface area a modern board is responsible for.
Tyler Cohen Wood spent thirteen years inside the US Department of Defense working on exactly that surface area. At the Defense Intelligence Agency she served as Senior Intelligence Officer and Deputy Cyber Division Chief in the Special Communications Division, and was designated the Cyber Subject Matter Expert for the DIA Science and Technologies Directorate. Her remit covered the White House, the DoD, federal law enforcement and the wider intelligence community. Before that, as a digital forensic examiner at NASA’s Office of Inspector General and the DoD Cyber Crime Center, she worked intrusion and major-crimes cases at evidentiary level.
She then took that fluency into the commercial world as Director of Cyber Risk Management at AT&T, where the question shifts from intelligence reporting to defending revenue, customers and brand at scale. She now co-leads Dark Cryptonite, a venture building patent-pending zero-trust encryption for governments and enterprises, and is founder and CEO of MyConnectedHealth, an AI platform for clinical diagnosis. She holds multiple US provisional patents in cyber.
What that combination gives an executive audience is a speaker who is currently building the technology she discusses, has carried the threat picture at state level, and has owned commercial cyber accountability inside a Fortune 10 business. Her writing reflects the same range: Catching the Catfishers on social engineering and online identity, and the co-authored Alternate Data Storage Forensics textbook used inside the forensics community.
Key speaking topics
- Cybersecurity as a board-level risk
- AI and deepfake-driven social engineering
- Emerging technology strategy for executives
- Digital transformation and cyber risk management
- The innovation mindset for technical and non-technical leaders
- AI in healthcare and connected health
- Women in technology and senior leadership
Ideal for
- Boards and executive committees treating cyber as a strategic, not IT, agenda item
- CISOs, CIOs and CTOs briefing non-technical leadership on AI-era threat posture
- Risk, audit and compliance leaders preparing for AI-driven fraud and identity attacks
- Industry conferences in financial services, healthcare, defence and critical infrastructure
Audience outcomes
- A clearer board-level model for where cyber risk now sits in the operating model
- Specific examples of how AI is changing social engineering, deepfakes and intrusion tactics
- A grounded view of what zero-trust and encryption actually mean for procurement and architecture decisions
- A working understanding of how AI is being deployed in regulated environments such as healthcare
- Confidence to ask sharper questions of internal security leaders and external vendors
Talks
A board-level orientation to the AI capabilities now shaping competitive and threat landscapes.
Key takeaways:
- Where AI is materially changing operating advantage and where it is hype
- How adversaries are using AI to scale social engineering and fraud
- What executives should be commissioning from their technical leaders
A working briefing on the new generation of identity and content attacks.
Key takeaways:
- How deepfake audio and video are now used against executives
- What technical and procedural defences actually work
- How to brief boards on identity risk without sliding into jargon
An executive primer that turns cyber and AI from a specialist topic into a leadership capability.
Key takeaways:
- A board-ready vocabulary for cyber, AI and emerging tech
- How to read the threat picture without becoming an analyst
- Where executive judgement adds the most value in cyber decisions
A talk on how to lead technical innovation under constraint, drawn from her work at DIA, AT&T and as a founder.
Key takeaways:
- How operational and intelligence environments approach novel problems
- What leaders can adopt from that pattern in commercial settings
- How to commission innovation that ships rather than stalls