Ex-prosecutor who helped take down The Silk Road joins board of hacker company

Fortune is reporting today that Kathryn Haun has joined the board of directors of HackerOne, a company that will pay a "bug bounty" to a hacker who attempts to hack a company, and then reports the software vulnerabilities that he or she found. This allows the company to fix its cybersecurity problems before a REAL hacker breaks in.

Haun is very well known in the crypto world. She sits on Coinbase's board of directors. Previously, she was an assistant U.S. Attorney in California and she headed her office's cryptocurrency prosecution team. She was central to some of the most well-known busts of cryptocurrency criminals, as well as investigations into crypto companies that weren't complying with federal law.

If you want to know more about Haun, a very interesting lawyer, I've written a profile story about her in the past for law.com.

Once upon a time there was a hero who took down the corrupt French Maid, who had manipulated and stolen from the Dread Pirate Roberts on The Silk Road.

It sounds like the plot line of a swashbuckler movie, but actually, it’s part of the tale of Kathryn Haun’s rise as a federal prosecutor who helped lay the groundwork for the government to capture cryptocurrency criminals.

Haun, first as a federal prosecutor and now as a bespoke legal consultant for emerging technology companies, has contributed much to beefing up security in the industry. In the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of California, she was the first digital currency coordinator. She handled cases that taught prosecutors to work through challenges in convicting cryptocurrency criminals, and sent loud-and-clear messages to digital currency companies to increase financial safeguards.