As a former hacker, Prof. Vigfusson argues that our main hope to improve cyber security is for all of us to adopt the attacker’s mindset and understand how hackers break in. Ymir Vigfusson is a professor, hacker, and entrepreneur. With his students at the SimBioSys lab at Emory University, he performs research into large-scale distributed systems (how should we build large systems?), cybersecurity education (how do we make the world more secure?), and data science (how do we exploit data to monitor epidemics?) He earned his B.Sc. in Mathematics from the University of Iceland in 2005, and PhD in Computer Science from Cornell University in 2009. In 2013, Ymir co-founded Syndis, now the leading cybersecurity company in Iceland, and the online cybersecurity training platform adversary.io in 2019. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at www.ted.com/tedx