AI Research

Christian Borst, EMEA CTO at Vectra AI has more than 15 years of experience in IT and Cyber Security. Before joining Vectra AI in 2022 he built and executed the global cyber security strategy for Richemont – a leading luxury goods group. As a former consultant and current Advisory Board & Board Member, he is actively engaged in the cyber security community across different countries & industries. He holds a university degree from Freiburg University in Computer Science specializing in AI & Psychology.

Oliver Tavakoli is Chief Technology Officer at Vectra AI. He sets the technical strategy for the company. Oliver 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 Oliver 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.

Tim Wade is Vectra AI's Deputy Chief Technology Officer and is an advocate for a vision of technology which places human dignity at the core of its mission. Tim traces much of his career in cybersecurity and technology leadership through the U.S. DoD and Federal sectors, having begun that journey as a uniformed member of the United States Air Force. He joins 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.

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Alex Groyz is a Security Researcher at Vectra AI with over a decade of experience in IT and software development. He specializes in cloud security, particularly within AWS holding several certifications, including AWS Solutions Architect Professional and AWS Security Specialist.

Prior to joining Vectra, Alex worked in client-facing roles, developing hybrid cloud strategies and helping organizations securely migrate their workloads. His diverse engineering background also includes designing, building, and deploying applications to cloud infrastructures.Alex's deep understanding of software development grounds his work as a Security Researcher, allowing him to anticipate the mindset of attackers and effectively identify and mitigate security threats.

Dmitriy Beryoza is a Senior Security Researcher with Vectra, working on threat detection in the cloud and on-prem networks. Before that, he was a penetration tester and secure software development advocate at IBM. Before switching to security full-time, Dmitriy has been a software developer for many years. He spoke at DEF CON, BSides Las Vegas, BSides SF, Hackfest, and other security conferences. Dmitriy 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.

Christian Borst, EMEA CTO at Vectra AI has more than 15 years of experience in IT and Cyber Security. Before joining Vectra AI in 2022 he built and executed the global cyber security strategy for Richemont – a leading luxury goods group. As a former consultant and current Advisory Board & Board Member, he is actively engaged in the cyber security community across different countries & industries. He holds a university degree from Freiburg University in Computer Science specializing in AI & Psychology.

Joshua St.Hilaire is currently a Director of Security Research at Vectra 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. Additionally, Joshua St. Hilaire began his career serving the United States Air Force and was responsible for keeping U.S. DoD information systems secure on a global scale.

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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 that 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.

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Himanshu is a Distinguished Data Scientist and over the past 11+ years at Vectra has driven the evolution of the AI capabilities of our products and platform in support of longer-term company initiatives and has since been an inventor of 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.

Luke is the Threat Intel Lead for Vectra. He has been with the company for 7 years, joining as a consultant analyst and working with customers and high level incident response directly. Before joining Vectra, Luke was a senior Security Analyst for an international Engineering and Defence contractor where he developed security team toolsets, processes, and incident response playbooks.

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Arpan Sarkar is a Senior Technical Marketing Engineer at Vectra AI. Arpan is a engineer at core with a passion to create simple solutions for hard problems in cyber security. Arpan 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. Arpan holds a MS in Cyber Security from Rochester Institute of Technology and a Bachelors in Computer Science from SRM University.

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Oliver Tavakoli is Chief Technology Officer at Vectra AI. He sets the technical strategy for the company. Oliver 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 Oliver 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.

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 and holds multiple GIAC certifications. You can find her on the internet as @nightmareJS.

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Tim Wade is Vectra AI's Deputy Chief Technology Officer and is an advocate for a vision of technology which places human dignity at the core of its mission. Tim traces much of his career in cybersecurity and technology leadership through the U.S. DoD and Federal sectors, having begun that journey as a uniformed member of the United States Air Force. He joins 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.

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