Alex Holden

Alex Holden is the Chief Information Security Officer of Hold Security, LLC, a role he holds alongside being the company's founder.

Career path

Holden began his cybersecurity career in IT at Baird, a financial services and brokerage firm. In late 2001 he took on his first Information Security Officer role at Baird and was soon promoted to Chief Information Security Officer, a position he held for nearly a decade. Hold Security's own biography states that before moving into consulting, Holden spent more than ten years as Chief Information Security Officer of a large U.S. brokerage firm, where he built vulnerability identification and penetration testing functions.
After the financial crisis of 2008, Holden left Baird and founded Hold Security, a cybersecurity threat-intelligence consultancy, where he now serves as Founder and Chief Information Security Officer.
Under his direction, Hold Security has been credited with discovering breaches at Adobe Systems, JPMorgan, Target and Yahoo, among others.

Threat intelligence work and public commentary

Holden describes Hold Security's threat-intelligence approach as resting on three elements: human behavior, technology, and artificial intelligence. "We've found some of the biggest breaches of our time," says Holden. The firm also served as the driving force behind the @ContiLeaks investigation into how ransomware collectives operate. In April 2026, Holden provided insight to Cybernews on the rise and fall of the Trickbot and Conti cybercriminal operations. He has also contributed commentary to the RSA Conference blog on impostors posing as employees and appeared on an RSA Conference podcast addressing AI-enabled cyberattacks. Holden speaks regularly through Hold Security's webinar channel, including a May 2025 talk titled Threat Actor Psychology: Using Social Engineering and Other Jedi Tricks. He also presented a 2024 webinar on balancing automation with human judgment in cybersecurity decision-making. Holden holds the CISSP certification and has experience in Windows, Unix and network administration alongside corporate information security governance. He is regularly quoted in mainstream media outlets including CNN, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.