Christopher Kruegel
Photo Gallery
 |
 |
Christopher Kruegel
Additional Info
| Job title of nominated professional (or team name) | Co-founder, CEO |
| Company (where nominated professional or team is working) | Lastline Inc. |
| Website | http://www.lastline.com |
| Company size (employees) | 50 to 99 |
| Country | United States |
| Headquarters Region | North America |
Overview
o Christopher’s motivation throughout his academic & professional career has been to understand malware and improve defenses against cyber crime. After getting his PhD in computer science in 2002, he embarked on a mission to defeat malware.
o As a professor at Vienna University of Technology & UC Santa Barbara, he applied academic rigor to understanding how criminals were designing malicious software and the characteristics that facilitated very high success at detecting it. He was a core member of the team that developed the Wepawet & Anubis systems (https://www.lastline.com/blog/from-anubis-and-wepawet-to-llama/) that put his research into practice. The feedback from thousands of early users was very positive with continued pressure and encouragement to start a company so that they could more formally adopt this new technology.
o Chris decided to put academia on hold and committed himself to forming Lastline. He raised venture money, built a team and infused the company with his vision of academic excellence blended with Silicon Valley pragmatism.
o Chris has published more than 100 peer-reviewed papers and has received the NSF CAREER Award, MIT Technology Review TR35 Award for young innovators, and the IBM Faculty Award. He was Program Committee Chair of Usenix LEET in 2011, RAID in 2007 and WORM in 2007. He also advised the European Commission on defenses to mitigate future threats against the Internet & Europe’s cyber-infrastructure. He was named the #2 most influential researcher in security by Microsoft Academic Davide Balzarotti, professor at EURECOM (http://s3.eurecom.fr/~balzarot/notes/top4/index.html). Additionally, Chris is a finalist for the 2017 Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award.
Accomplishments
o Company Success.
Lastline is widely acknowledged as offering the industry’s most effective advanced malware protection solution. Under Christopher's leadership, Lastline has seen tremendous customer growth since its flagship product, Lastline Enterprise, was first introduced in 2013. Lastline now protects over five million users across hundreds of enterprise accounts and has doubled in size every year since the product was first available.
o Third-Party Validation.
Lastline was recognized as the top security effectiveness performer out of nine competitive products in the NSS Labs 2016 Breach Detection Group Test – ahead of FireEye, Check Point, Cisco, Fortinet, Trend Micro, and others. Lastline Enterprise received NSS Labs’ Recommended rating for the second year in a row and was the only breach detection product to receive a perfect detection rate of 100 percent in all test categories with zero false positives. Additionally, the Forrester Wave™: Automated Malware Analysis Q2 Report identifies Lastline as the strongest current offering on the market.
o Academic Roots and Values.
Lastline’s rise to becoming the leader in advanced malware protection began in the classroom. Christopher has not forgotten his roots and is still a professor at UC Santa Barbara where he is guiding and inspiring the next generation of security professionals. Not many companies draw from academia like Lastline has – he is very open to it and embraces it. With attackers constantly finding new vulnerabilities and developing sophisticated evasion techniques, Christopher continues to innovate in the classroom and the boardroom to deliver superior security solutions that protect customers against advanced malware. There’s a fundamental concept in academia to “get it right,” which Christopher has successfully applied to Lastline. Under his guidance, Lastline continues to provide the next generation of threat protection, demanding the most effective possible solution. At Lastline, “good enough” isn’t. The goal is to get it right.
