StopBadware’s Advisory Board includes a number of top internet experts from the fields of academia, industry, and government, who provide high-level guidance to the project.

The Advisory Board members include:

Vinton G. Cerf

Vinton G. Cerf is vice president and chief Internet evangelist for Google. Cerf served as a senior vice president of MCI from 1994-2005.

Widely known as one of the “Fathers of the Internet,” Cerf is a co-designer of the TCP/IP protocols and of the architecture of the Internet. He received the U.S. National Medal of Technology in 1997 and the 2004 ACM Alan M. Turing award. In November 2005, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Vint Cerf serves as chairman of the board of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) and was the founding president of the Internet Society. He is a Fellow of the IEEE, ACM, and American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the International Engineering Consortium, and the Computer History Museum and the National Academy of Engineering.

Cerf holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Mathematics from Stanford University and Master of Science and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from UCLA.

Esther Dyson

Esther Dyson is editor of Release 1.0, the influential quarterly newsletter published by CNET Networks, and runs PC Forum and other events for CNET. She sold her business, EDventure Holdings, to CNET Networks in early 2004. Previously, she had co-owned EDventure and written/edited Release 1.0 since 1983. She has led CNET networks’ Anti-Spyware workshop, and accompanied it with a comprehensive report about four leading adware companies. Among her angel investments was Flickr, sold to Yahoo! earlier this year. She is also an investor in and sits on the boards of Meetup.com, EVDB (eventful.com), CVO Group (an online recruiting service operating in Central and Eastern Europe) and Yandex, Russia’s leading search company. She is also on the board of WPP Group, the worldwide communications/marketing company, and was on the consumer advisory board of Orbitz until its recent sale to Cendant.

Dyson is also an active player in discussions and international policy-making concerning the Internet and society. From 1998 to 2000, she was founding chairman of ICANN (the organization responsible for overseeing the Domain Name System. A variety of government officials worldwide turn to her for advice on Internet policy issues. In 1997, she wrote a book on the impact of the Net on individuals’ lives, Release 2.0: A design for living in the digital age. She also donates time and money as a trustee to emerging organizations Bridges.org, the National Endowment for Democracy, and the Eurasia Foundation. She was chairman of the Electronic Frontier Foundation for several years. She has a degree from Harvard in economics.

Michael Barrett

Michael Barrett is the chief information security officer for PayPal. In this role he is responsible for ensuring the security of information systems and services, as well as the integrity and confidentiality of customer and employee information. Before joining PayPal, Barrett was vice president of security and utility strategy at American Express where he helped define the company’s information-security program and directed its Internet technology strategy.

Previously, Barrett was president of the Liberty Alliance, an open-standards consortium focused on identity management standards and guidelines. Barrett was the driving force behind the introduction and standardization of the Alliance’s federated identity concepts, and he also co-chaired its Identity Theft Prevention Working Group. Barrett is both a certified information systems security professional (CISSP) and a certified information security manager (CISM). He graduated from Brighton University (U.K.), where he earned a bachelor of science degree in computer science.

Beau Brendler

Beau Brendler is the director of Consumer Reports WebWatch, the leader in investigative reporting on trust and credibility in the online marketplace. To date, WebWatch’s credibility campaign has led more than 170 sites, including The New York Times, CNET, HP, Barnes & Noble, The Mayo Clinic, CNN, Monster, HotJobs, Travelocity and Orbitz to agree to uphold the WebWatch credibility guidelines, making steps toward improving the integrity of the Web.

Prior to joining Consumers Union in 2001, Brendler was editorial director and a founder of ABC News.com. He was asked to help launch the TV network’s news site and create its newsroom while working in Washington on ABC News’ PoliticsNow site, a joint venture with the Washington Post and National Journal. He had been news editor of the PoliticsUSA site, created by National Journal and The Hotline. Brendler was also editor-in-chief of two Washington-based technology magazines, now owned by the Washington Post Co.

Individually, Brendler has won several reporting awards, including the 1993 C.B. Blethen Memorial Award for Distinguished Investigative Reporting. He is an oft-cited source on online credibility, consumer awareness, privacy and security, media issues and search engines. Brendler started his journalism career at weekly newspapers in Seattle, Wash., and then as a reporter and assistant city editor at the Anchorage Times daily newspaper in Alaska until its buyout and closure in 1992. He taught journalism at the University of Maryland, College Park, and covered the White House, Pentagon and Congress on the technology beat for Thomson publications.

Ari Schwartz

Ari Schwartz is Deputy Director of the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT). Ari’s work focuses on increasing individual control over personal and public information. He promotes privacy protections in the digital age and expanding access to government information via the Internet. Ari leads the Anti-Spyware Coalition, a group dedicated to building consensus about definitions and best practices in the debate surrounding spyware and other potentially unwanted technologies. Composed of anti-spyware software companies, academics, and consumer groups, the ASC seeks to bring together a diverse array of perspective on the problem of controlling spyware and other potentially unwanted technologies. He regularly testifies before Congress and Executive Branch Agencies on these and related issues.

George He

George He is senior vice president and chief technology officer of Lenovo. He is responsible for corporate research and development systems and product chain (research and development) management and oversees the company’s research centers in Beijing, China; Raleigh, North Carolina; and Yamato, Japan. Previously, Mr. He was senior vice president, Research and Technology, and the managing director of Lenovo’s corporate Research and Development, during which he made significant contributions to Lenovo’s R&D initiatives and systems. He joined Lenovo in 1986 after graduating from the Institute of Computing Technology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences with a master’s degree in Computer Science.