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Let’s Celebrate Some Good News In Cybersecurity
Meet Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist, and an impactful cyber donor who is making the online world a safer place.
Anthony Collette
February 03, 2026 • Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes
Happy Tuesday! What’s the difference between the cybersecurity industry and the cybersecurity community? The cybersecurity industry sells a combination of hardware, software and services, mostly to large organizations and employers. It’s highly technical and has many specializations. |  |
You can think of the cybersecurity community as everything else — student cyber clinics, non-profits doing work in cyber, donors who fund cyber civil defense, etc.
There’s a tremendous amount of fantastic work being done to help the public understand what’s happening and how to respond.
Today let’s explore some good news: a dedicated donor helping cyber organizations band together and push back against the Digital Kleptos™ attacking the public.
— Anthony Collette
Founder, Loistava Information Security
It’s Time To Celebrate Some Good News!
Meet Craig Newmark — the founder of Craigslist, and currently the most impactful donor in the effort to protect the public from cyber scams.
Craig made his fortune by starting Craigslist, the online classified site where people can buy or sell just about anything. So far he’s given roughly $450 million to various charities and pledged millions more. Recently he and his wife, Eilene, signed The Giving Pledge, a public promise by the world’s wealthiest donors to give the majority of their wealth to charitable causes in their lifetime or through their wills.
Although he’s supported many causes in the past, today he focuses on just two: helping veterans and military families and cybersecurity.
I’ve been doing scam fighting professionally for about 25 years. It just really pisses me off. I take this very personally.
Why cybersecurity?
Craigslist provided — and still provides — a digital marketplace, helping people buy and sell all sorts of products. Protecting its own users from scams was a high priority, so Craig had decades of firsthand experience identifying and preventing fraud. His own family members have been scammed, and even Newmark himself has been duped.
“I’ve been doing scam fighting professionally for about 25 years,” Newmark says. “It just really pisses me off. I take this very personally.”
In cybersecurity, he works with a broader range of partners, including Aspen Digital, a program of the Aspen Institute that focuses on technology, media, and policy; the University of California at Berkeley’s Center for Long‑Term Cybersecurity; and several other organizations. Newmark encourages his partners to collaborate, including on his own campaign — Take9 — urging people to pause for nine seconds before clicking on suspicious links.
Roughly half of Newmark’s cybersecurity giving focuses on scam prevention; the rest supports efforts to protect critical infrastructure such as power grids. Through the Berkeley center, he has backed the build-out of the Cyber Resilience Corps, an effort to mobilize a nationwide force of volunteers to defend nonprofits, schools, municipalities, and small businesses from cyberattacks. Citizens should see protecting infrastructure as a patriotic duty, Newmark says, since global powers like China and Russia are already carrying out cyberattacks and espionage in the United States. He compares the campaign to the effort to get all Americans to contribute during World War II.
Cyber Civil Defense is becoming increasingly important since the federal government is cutting its own spending on cybersecurity.
With all the bad news about hacking and the negative impact on real people, it’s really encouraging to learn more about donors that are stepping up, and the projects they fund that help the public.
If you want to learn a little bit more about Craig Newmark’s work in cybersecurity, check out this article by Ben Gose, the senior editor at the Chronicle of Philanthropy.
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Looking forward to connecting again next week.
— Anthony Collette
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