Ben Johnson is CTO and co-founder of Obsidian Security. Prior to founding Obsidian, he co-founded Carbon Black and most recently served as the company’s Chief Security Strategist. As the company’s original CTO, he led efforts to create the powerful capabilities that helped define the next-generation endpoint security space.

Prior to Carbon Black, Ben was an NSA computer scientist, and later worked as a cyber engineer in an advanced intrusion operations division for the intelligence community.

Ben is active in the cybersecurity community, where he is a technical advisor to the US FISA Court and sits on the boards of multiple security startups. Ben earned a bachelor’s degree in computer science from the University of Chicago and a master’s degree in computer science from Johns Hopkins University. He lives in Newport Beach, CA with his wife and three sons.