Yanya Viskovich is a former cybercrime prosecutor who has spent the past 17 years working on cybersecurity from various angles across the globe. She began her career in Australia prosecuting State and Federal crimes, advising the Australian Federal Privacy Commissioner and training and capacity-building law enforcement agencies. Since then, Yanya has held various senior in-house legal, strategic advisory, and research roles – in large multinationals, government, academia, and in international organisations including the International Committee of the Red Cross, and the United Nations – for whom she strategized crisis contingency plans for Lebanon during the height of the Syria crisis, established anti-fraud programs, and edited and operationalised the UN’s first data protection policy throughout UNHCR’s global operations.
A specialist in human cyber risk, legal data protection and digital ethics, Yanya is a TEDx and keynote speaker at international cybersecurity conferences, Fortune 500 company events, industry bodies and associations. Her March 2023 TEDx talk, “Why Burnout Culture is a Cyber Risk”, has been instrumental in raising awareness about the impacts of stress and burnout on organisational cyber risk and resilience. A published thought leader in her field, Yanya has guest lectured on cybersecurity at the European Centre on Privacy and Cybersecurity at Maastricht University, and on data protection at the University of St. Gallen, Switzerland, and has contributed to and edited various professional standards and publications on cybersecurity, AI, data protection, privacy, and data ethics.
Yanya is based in Zurich, Switzerland, where she is a Senior Manager in Security Consulting at Accenture, where she supports CISOs, C-Suites and Boards to build their organisations’ cyber resilience by addressing the human risk factor in cybersecurity. In addition, Yanya is Chair of Cyber Law & Governance at the Swiss Cyber Institute in Zรผrich where she hosts thought leadership roundtables, is an independently appointed expert ethics advisor to the European Commission HorizonEurope programme, and is a Kickstart Innovation expert advisor to cybersecurity and deep-tech startups. She has served as a CISO Summit Advisory Board member of IDC, and as a Judge and Coach for (medal-winning) post-graduate university teams competing in the Atlantic Council’s Cyber 9/12 Strategy Challenge – the world’s only multidisciplinary cyber simulation competition focused on bolstering resilience for tomorrow’s cyber challenges.
Yanya is an Australian Bar-admitted attorney and holds a Bachelor of Laws, a Bachelor of International Relations, and a Master of Laws from the Australian National University; a Data Protection Officer certification from the European Centre on Privacy and Cybersecurity at Maastricht University; executive certificates in cybersecurity management from MIT Sloan School and the Geneva Centre for Security Policy, and in applied computer science from EPFL.