Cyber security research and innovation

Dmitriy Beryoza is a senior security researcher with Vectra AI. He works on threat detection in the cloud and on-premises networks. Before Vectra AI, he was a penetration tester and secure software development advocate at IBM — and worked as a software developer for many years before switching to security full-time. Dmitriy has spoken at DEF CON, BSides Las Vegas, BSides SF, Hackfest, and other security conferences. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science and OSCP, CISSP, CCSP and CEH certifications. His interests include reverse engineering, secure software development, and CTF competitions.

Joshua St.Hilaire is a director of security research at Vectra AI, where he currently leads research on adversarial detection models. He has twenty years of experience in computer security focused on incident response, threat hunting, and reverse-engineering. Before joining Vectra AI, Joshua began his career serving the United States Air Force and was responsible for keeping U.S. DoD information systems secure on a global scale.

Luke is the threat intel lead for Vectra AI. He has been with the company for seven years, joining as a consultant analyst and working with customers and high level incident response directly. Before joining Vectra AI, Luke was a senior security analyst for an international engineering and defense contractor where he developed SOC toolsets, processes, and incident response playbooks.

Arpan Sarkar is a senior technical marketing engineer at Vectra AI. He has a passion for creating simple solutions to hard problems in cyber security. He brings extensive experience in threat research, threat hunting, and threat detection engineering. Prior to joining Vectra AI, Arpan worked on developing behavior based threat detection, creating new threat hunting services and consulting organizations on threat hunting and insider threat programs. He holds an MS in Cyber Security from the Rochester Institute of Technology and a Bachelors in Computer Science from SRM University.

Kat Traxler is the principal security researcher at Vectra AI, focusing on abuse techniques and vulnerabilities in the public cloud. Before her current role, she worked at various stages in the SDLC, performing web application penetration testing and security architecture design for Web, IAM, Payment, and Cloud Native Technologies. Kat’s research philosophy directs her work to where design flaws and misconfigurations are most probable. This guiding principle leads her research to the intersection of technologies, particularly the convergence of cloud security and application security, and where the OS layer interfaces with higher-level abstractions.

Kat has presented at various conferences, including the SANS CloudSecNext Summit and fwd:CloudSec, on topics such as privilege escalation in GCP and bug-hunting in the cloud. In addition to her work at Vectra AI, she is a member of IANS Faculty and the Lead Author of the SANS SEC549 - Enterprise Cloud Security Architecture. She holds multiple GIAC certifications.

Sohrob Kazerounian is a distinguished AI researcher at Vectra AI, where he develops and applies novel machine learning architectures in the domain of cybersecurity. After realizing his goal of becoming a skilled hacker was not meant to be, he focused his studies on Artificial Intelligence, with a particular interest in neural networks. After receiving his Ph.D. in  Cognitive and Neural Systems at Boston University, he held a postdoctoral fellowship at the Swiss AI Lab (IDSIA) working on Deep Learning, Recurrent Neural Networks, and Reinforcement Learning.

Himanshu is a distinguished data scientist, driving the evolution of Vectra AI products and platform capabilities in support of longer-term company initiatives. He’s invented multiple AI-driven patented and patent-pending technologies. He completed his Ph.D. in Cognitive and Neural Systems at Boston University and held a Kavli Postdoctoral Fellowship in Neuroscience at Columbia University.

Matt Silver is the VP of Data Science at Vectra, overseeing development of AI models and systems that detect and prioritize attack behaviors in close partnership with Security Research. Matt has been at Vectra for over 10 years, building on his prior experience in research and modeling at MIT and his PhD work in computational neuroscience, neural networks, and machine learning.

Ben has been developing and implementing attack detection methods at Vectra AI for the last five years. Lately, he has focused using modeling and machine learning to protect AWS and Azure infrastructure.  He has a PhD in physics from Brown University, where he studied the behavior of liquids at tiny scales.

Christian Borst has more than 15 years of experience in IT and cyber security. Before joining Vectra AI, he built and executed the global cyber security strategy for Richemont — a leading luxury goods group. As a former consultant and current Advisory Board and Board Member, he is actively engaged in the cyber security community across different countries and industries. He holds a degree from Freiburg University in computer science specializing in AI and psychology.

Oliver Tavakoli sets the technical strategy for Vectra AI. He has overseen the adoption of technology in cybersecurity for over 25 years, the last ten of which have been at Vectra AI. Prior to Vectra AI, Oliver was the CTO for the security business of Juniper Networks. He joined Juniper as a result of its acquisition of Funk Software, where he was the CTO. Earlier in his career, Oliver worked at IBM, Fluent Machines, and Novell INC and founded Trilogy Inc, which was acquired by Funk Software.

As deputy chief technology officer, Tim Wade is an advocate for a vision of technology that places human dignity at the core of its mission. Tim traces much of his career in cyber security and technology leadership to the U.S. DoD and federal sectors, having begun his journey as a uniformed member of the United States Air Force. He joined Vectra AI most recently from Bridgepoint Education Inc., having served as the Head of Application and Information Security. Tim holds an MS in computer science from the University of Southern California, an MBA from Arizona State University, and maintains industry credentials issued by Offensive Security and (ISC)2.