Ben Johnson is CTO and co-founder of Obsidian Security. Prior to founding Obsidian, he co-founded Carbon Black and most recently served as the company’s chief security strategist. As the company’s original CTO, he led efforts to create the powerful capabilities that helped define the next-generation endpoint security space. Prior to Carbon Black, Ben was an NSA computer scientist and later worked as a cyber engineer in an advanced intrusion operations division for the intelligence community.
Johnson has extensive experience building complex systems for environments where speed and reliability are paramount. His background also includes a great deal of technical “agility,” having worked on advanced operational teams supporting US national security missions and writing complex calculation engines for the financial sector.
Johnson earned a bachelor’s degree in computer science from the University of Chicago and a master’s degree in computer science from Johns Hopkins University. He also taught “Entrepreneurship in Technology” in the Masters Program of Computer Science at the University of Chicago in 2016 and 2017.