Black Hat 2024: LastPass Reinvents Itself with Strength, Intelligence

Christofer Hoff saw plenty of opportunity a few years ago on the eve of joining password juggernaut LastPass. The company was in the midst of spinning out the password management part of its business when it was hit by a data breach that temporarily brought things to a halt. But as Hoff tells the Dark Reading News Desk during Black Hat USA, this was the perfect moment to rebuild the brand with greater resilience and protections. "You can call them the elements of a perfect storm," Hoff says. "So we set about to remake the company and reinvent it and as we joined together with a new executive team," in the process.

For Hoff, this crossroads was also an invitation to address password managers' biggest, and often conflicting, priorities: security and convenience. "So that attracted me to LastPass because the proposition was instant," Hoff says. He also liked the greenfield opportunity contained within the spinoff. And a third piece was to join the company in a position where CTO and CISO roles were merged under a single heading, hence his Chief Security Technology Officer title with LastPass.

The predecessor company's data breach also contained useful lessons for the reinvented LastPass. "One thing we learned is a focus on people, making sure that our ability to communicate well and clearly to our customers is supremely important. And ensuring that we're able to think about how our platform itself is relied upon by our customers," Hoff explains. "We learned a lot of lessons about resilience, being able to invest and make sure our people are taking care so that they can execute on their function in the middle of duress."

Christofer Hoff joined LastPass as Chief Secure Technology Officer in 2022, bringing more than 29 years of experience in high-profile global roles in network and information security architecture, development, engineering, operations and management. Before joining LastPass, Christofer had multiple cybersecurity leadership roles at Bank of America. Prior to working at Bank of America, his roles include the Chief Information Security Officer at Citadel, Vice President and Security CTO at Juniper Networks, and Director of Cloud & Virtualization Solutions at Cisco Systems, among other security-focused roles. 

In addition to his professional leadership responsibilities, Chris takes an active role in engaging youth in the impact of technology, privacy and security on society and culture as founder of HacKid, an interactive STEAM conference for parents and kids from diverse backgrounds.  Chris was a founding member of and technical advisor to the Cloud Security Alliance and serves as an advisor to numerous companies and organizations.