Management Team

Who We Are

Lastline was founded in 2009 by three university professors (Dr. Engin Kirda, Dr. Christopher Kruegel, and
Dr. Giovanni Vigna) to commercialize their world-class academic research on malware analysis and countermeasures. The founders are well-known for their development of Anubis and Wepawet. Dr. Kirda is currently a professor at Northeastern University in Boston. Dr. Kruegel and Dr. Vigna are professors at the University of California in Santa Barbara. Each has published over a hundred papers, and are considered the thought leaders on malware detection and prevention.

The founders have been involved in high-impact security projects, such as the analysis of the voting machines of the states of California and Ohio, have received awards for their research (Dr. Kruegel won MIT’s prestigious TR35 award), and the team annually qualifies and participates in the DefCon’s Capture The Flag (CTF) competitions. The team won this competition in 2005.

Leadership Team

Jens Andreassen, CEO
Jens Andreassen has more than 25 years of global sales and business development experience. Before Jens joined Lastline, he was at Fortinet (FTNT) for more than eight years responsible for setting up and running sales operations internationally representing 70 percent of the company's revenue at the time. Jens was also responsible for new product and technology initiatives and related strategic partnerships. Prior to Fortinet, he held key sales and executive positions at Narus (acquired by Boeing), Micromuse (acquired by IBM), and Tandberg (acquired by Cisco). Jens holds Bachelor of Science and Master of Business and Marketing degrees from the Norwegian School of Management in Oslo and an MBA from Babson College, Babson Park, Mass.

Christopher Kruegel, Ph.D, Co-Founder & Chief Scientist
Dr. Kruegel is a co-founder of Lastline, and currently serves as Chief Scientist. He is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at UC Santa Barbara, where he holds the Eugene Aas Chair. Before that, he was on the faculty of the Technical University Vienna, Austria. Dr. Kruegel's research interests are computer and communications security, with an emphasis on malware analysis and detection, web security, and intrusion detection. He has published more than 90 peer-reviewed papers in top computer security conferences. Dr. Kruegel is the recipient of an NSF CAREER Award, an MIT Technology Review TR35 Award for young innovators, an IBM Faculty Award, and several best paper awards. Moreover, he serves as an associate editor for several journals and on program committees of leading computer security conferences. Dr. Kruegel was the Program Committee Chair of the Usenix Workshop on Large Scale Exploits and Emergent Threats (LEET, 2011), the International Symposium on Recent Advances in Intrusion Detection (RAID, 2007), and the ACM Workshop on Recurring Malcode (WORM, 2007). Dr. Kruegel was also the head of a working group that advised the European Commission (EC) on defenses to mitigate future threats against the Internet and Europe's cyber-infrastructure.

Giovanni Vigna, Ph.D., Co-Founder & CTO
Dr. Giovanni Vigna a co-founder of Lastline, where he is the CTO. He is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of California in Santa Barbara and the director of the Center for CyberSecurity at UCSB. Dr. Vigna has been working on security for more than 20 years, working on malware analysis, web security, vulnerability assessment, and intrusion detection. He also edited a book on mobile code security and authored one on intrusion correlation. He has been the Program Chair of the International Symposium on Recent Advances in Intrusion Detection (RAID 2003), of the ISOC Symposium on Network and Distributed Systems Security (NDSS 2009), and of the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (in 2010 and 2011). He is known for organizing and running an inter-university Capture The Flag hacking contest, called iCTF, that every year involves dozens of institutions and hundreds of students around the world. He also leads the Shellphish hacking team, who participated to a number of DefCon CTFs, winning in 2005. Giovanni Vigna received his M.S. with honors and Ph.D. from Politecnico di Milano, Italy, in 1994 and 1998, respectively.

Engin Kirda, Ph.D., Co-Founder & Chief Architect
Dr. Kirda is a co-founder of Lastline, and currently serves as the Director of Research. He is the Sy and Laurie Sternberg Associate Professor of Information Assurance at the Northeastern University in Boston. He is also the director of the Northeastern Information Assurance Institute. Before that, he has held faculty positions at Institute Eurecom in the French Riviera and the Technical University of Vienna where he co-founded the Secure Systems Lab that is now distributed over five institutions in Europe and US. Dr. Kirda's recent research has focused on malware analysis (e.g., Anubis, Exposure, Fire) and detection, web application security, and practical aspects of social networking security. His recent work on the deanonymization of social network users received wide media coverage. He co-authored more than 90 peer-reviewed scholarly publications and served on program committees of numerous well-known international conferences and workshops. In 2009, Dr. Kirda was the Program Chair of the International Symposium on Recent Advances in Intrusion Detection (RAID), in 2010/11, Program Chair of the European Workshop on Systems Security (Eurosec), and is the Program Chair of the well-known USENIX Workshop on Large Scale Exploits and Emergent Threats in 2012. In the past, Dr. Kirda has consulted the European Commission on emerging threats, and recently gave a Congressional Briefing in Washington D.C. on advanced malware attacks and cyber-security.

Luca Simonelli, VP WW Sales & GM EMEA
With more than 20 years of experience in the ICT industry, as well as in a variety of vertical markets, including retail, energy, oil & gas, government, finance, healthcare, manufacturing and service providers, Luca is a seasoned sales leader with a passion for explosive growth. A dynamic leader, with a proven track record in IT solutions, with more than a decade leading dramatic growth in diverse and startup environments and who is able to direct and motivate others to success, by forging world-class multidisciplinary teams. Prior to joining Lastline, Luca was Vice President EMEA at Fortinet (FTNT), the market leader of the Unified Threat Management. Prior to Fortinet, Luca had served at Attachmate as Regional Director and before at SOGEI Spa as System Engineer and Software Developer. Luca holds a BSc in Computer Science from the University of Milan, Italy.

Engineering Team

Ludovico Cavedon
Ludovico is a Security Researcher. He is responsible for the development of traffic analysis tools. He holds an MS from UC Santa Barbara and his research interests include web vulnerability analysis and anti-malware techniques.

Marco Cova
Marco is a Senior Security Researcher. In this capacity, he is responsible for the analysis and detection of web-based threats. He holds a PhD from UC Santa Barbara and his research interests include web-based malware, intrusion detection, and vulnerability analysis.

Gregoire Jacob
Gregoire Jacob is as a Senior Threat Analyst. His work concentrates on malware analysis, reverse engineering, large-scale machine learning algorithms, statistical analysis of botnets.

Thorsten Holz
Thorsten works as a Senior Threat Analyst. He is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany. His work concentrates on bots/botnets, honeypots/honeynets, malware analysis and similar topics from the area of system and network security.

Clemens Kolbitsch
Clemens is a Security Researcher. As a PhD student, he has gained profound expertise in analyzing current, malicious code found in the wild. He has observed various trends in the malware community and successfully published peer-reviewed research papers. In the past, he also investigated offensive technologies presenting results at conferences such as BlackHat.

Paolo Milani
Paolo is the Head of Research at Lastline, Inc. His research interests cover many aspects of network and systems security, including malware analysis, reverse engineering, as well as application and operating system security.