Kyla Guru

Kyla Guru is 20 years old and already reimagining the future of cybersecurity, digital privacy, and AI. When she was 14 years old, Guru discovered her passion for human-centered security, discovering that 90% of cyberattacks were due to human error. To combat this, Guru founded Bits N’ Bytes Cybersecurity Education Corp (BNBCE), an international 501(c)(3) that distributes curriculum to 1,000+ schools and sustains partnerships with corporations like Facebook and IBM, and educational platforms to increase training/awareness in cybersecurity and privacy. Guru has recently expanded this mission to India, where she led an initiative to bring cybersecurity workshops and resources to 300 students across the Southern region of the country. Guru has also connected with students and educators across Singapore, Indonesia, and the Philippines, and more.

Guru has seen first-hand how online threats can intimately affect lives, gaining expertise in cybersecurity across threat intelligence, offensive hacking, and security engineering at Apple, Facebook, various nonprofits, and the U.S. Government. She has championed her message for empowering individuals in cyber on national and international stages including TEDxChicago, NIST’s NICE Conference, Tableau’s DataCon, RSAC-USA, and RSAC-Singapore. She is also the co-founder of GirlCon Tech, an international annual conference that unites 1,000+ industry professionals and students annually to discuss bridging the gender gap.

For her impact-driven work, Guru has been honored as Crain Chicago’s Top 50 in Tech, a Stanford She++ fellow, a 2018 Global Teen Leader, and a 2019 Harvard Book Prize Award winner. Guru is also a student at Stanford University studying Computer Science and International Security with Honors. Guru has also led several Stanford teams to international and national victories, including Cyber 9/12 Strategy Challenge, the Collegiate Penetration Testing Competition, and the Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition.