Christopher A. Smith

Author & Digital Safety Advocate

Christopher A. Smith is the award-winning author of Privacy Pandemic, a Foreword Reviews Book of the Year finalist, and the writer of The Digital Safety Brief, a bi-weekly publication focused on the economics of digital safety and the structural gaps between the scale of cybercrime, institutional response, and the financial systems underpinning digital risk. He is a digital safety advocate and an entrepreneur focused on advancing the infrastructure required to protect individuals in an increasingly complex digital environment.

After a widespread cyberattack in 2018 compromised every aspect of his digital life, he founded DFend, an AI-driven platform designed to deliver proactive, cross-platform protection. That work demonstrated that individual digital safety requires machine-speed detection and coordinated defense across platforms. This focus now continues through The Defend Foundation, a nonprofit initiative advancing global understanding of digital safety risks and the infrastructure required to address them.

Chris previously founded Stitch Video, a content distribution and monetization platform acquired in 2023, and has held senior leadership roles across platform, identity, and digital infrastructure companies, including Civic, Turn, Collective, and Adap.tv. He was named to Cybersecurity Ventures’ inaugural Cybersecurity Pundit List for his work on digital identity and individual protection. He believes the next decade of cybersecurity will be defined by coordinated individual defense, complementing the industry’s traditional focus on institutional protection by addressing the needs of individuals operating across every platform, service, and device. Chris is based in the United States.