Scott Roberts

Breach Alpha: Trading on Cyber Fallout

When a company suffers a breach, its stock price often takes a hit. But the timing and severity of the market’s reaction? That’s a moving target. What if you could get ahead of the curve, spot the signal early, and make your move before the herd?

This talk unpacks how public breadcrumbs like EDGAR filings, executive blog posts, and social media chatter can reveal breach activity before formal disclosures. We’ll explore how these signals differ by industry, how timing gaps between breach, announcement, and market response can be measured, and how those gaps open the door for strategic action, whether you’re looking to buy the dip, short the drop, or ride the volatility.

We’ll dive into case studies of real breaches, market misreads, and missed opportunities. We will also show how a signal-driven approach to breach tracking can be used to build a legally sound, ethically grounded, and unapologetically opportunistic model for cyber-informed trading.

Scott J. Roberts is a cybersecurity leader with over 15 years of experience specializing in cyber threat intelligence and threat hunting after leadership roles at GitHub, Apple, and Splunk. He blends machine learning with traditional intelligence frameworks to track and disrupt nation state and criminal adversaries. Scott serves as an Instructor of Cyber Security at Utah State University and an Entrepreneurial Fellow at USU’s Center for Growth and Opportunity, researching the intersection of cybersecurity and Anticipatory Intelligence. He co-authored O’Reilly’s “Intelligence-Driven Incident Response,” serves on the SANS CTI & DFIR Summits Advisory Committee, and speaks regularly at industry conferences. Passionate about security automation and macOS security, Scott mentors the next generation of cybersecurity professionals while remaining what he calls a “bad guy catcher” at heart.