Riva Richmond is a freelance journalist based in New York who writes about technology, with a special focus on computer security and privacy, for The New York Times, Entrepreneur.com, The Wall Street Journal and other national publications.

Riva's work draws on expertise built during more than eight years as a technology beat reporter at Dow Jones Newswires and contributor to The Wall Street Journal. In the late 1990s, she wrote about the rowdy world of stock-chat sites and its downfall as the tech bubble burst. Then she tracked the macabre inventions of virus writers, hackers and identity thieves – and the security industry’s efforts to stop them. As online advertising recovered, Riva picked up the Internet beat, covering the rise of Google and online-advertising boom, winning in 2006 the Newswomen’s Club of New York’s prestigious Front Page award for beat reporting. In her last year at Dow Jones, she covered semiconductor innovation and the Intel-AMD rivalry.

Riva also contributed to The Journal’s Enterprise column on small business for four years, writing about technology subjects from e-commerce to blogging to marketing on Facebook and non-technology issues like doing business abroad and the struggles of reservist business owners on long deployments in Iraq.

Prior to joining Dow Jones, Riva was business correspondent for Cairo Times, a fortnightly English-language news magazine in Cairo, Egypt. She spent three years as a research associate at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York working on projects related to Middle East and Islamist politics.

Riva graduated from Barnard College, Columbia University, in 1993 with a B.A. in Middle East studies. She lived in Cairo for three years and has traveled extensively in the Middle East, Europe and India. From the age of five through college, she studied ballet and modern dance. After college, she took up kung fu and now practices hatha yoga and is learning to surf at her local Rockaway break.