Manos Antonakakis, PhD, Appointed Chief Scientist Of Damballa

PRESS RELEASE

Atlanta – April 30, 2013 - Damballa, the experts in advanced threat protection, have promoted Dr. Manos Antonakakis to the role of Chief Scientist. In this role, Antonakakis will direct advanced research and university collaborations for the company. The techniques and technologies developed by the advanced research team power the threat detection engine underlying Damballa's products and services.

Dr. Antonakakis's research includes patent-pending Pleiades, Kopis and Notos detection profilers, which have revolutionized early threat warning based on the behavior, intelligence and content of malware communications with its command and control. Leveraging these detection techniques, Damballa can proactively identify threats without requiring access to the actual malware. This capability enables threat detection well before the malware samples are discovered and signatures are incorporated into prevention technologies.

"Damballa continues to innovate and incorporate ever more sophisticated detection techniques," said Brian Foster, CTO at Damballa. "Our customers are able to detect malware infections within their networks far earlier than they can with traditional prevention solutions. Leveraging this technology has enabled our clients to significantly reduce time to remediation and improve the cleanliness of their network."

Dr. Antonakakis is also co-chair of the Academic Committee of the Messaging, Malware and Mobile Anti-Abuse Working Group (M3AAWG). The organization works on a variety of initiatives addressing ongoing and emerging messaging and mobile abuse, including bot mitigation, cooperative industry outreach, Web messaging abuse, DNS abuse, wireless messaging, and senders' issues.

"I am excited to lead a growing research team, which offers a unique environment for security researchers by exposing them to research datasets and meta-information that no other company can provide," said Dr. Antonakakis. "Our ongoing collaboration with key academic institutions, including Georgia Tech, the University of North Carolina, and the University of Georgia, combined with our worldwide visibility from customer networks, provides a breadth of security datasets that is unmatched in the industry. I look forward to furthering our industry and academic collaborations to change the status quo of threat detection and help solve today's most challenging security problems faster and more effectively."

"The deep partnerships Damballa has developed with leading research institutions give them greater visibility into the behavior of emerging threats on a global basis," said Dr. Wenke Lee, co-founder of Damballa, Professor in the School of Computer Science, College of Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology and Director of the Georgia Tech Information Security Center (GTISC). "The research Manos and his team have conducted in these areas has been groundbreaking, and we look forward to continued, close collaboration to further develop these advanced threat detection technologies."

Dr. Antonakakis earned his PhD from the Georgia Institute of Technology College of Computing and has been with Damballa since 2009. Prior to joining Damballa, he worked for IBM/ISS and was a guest researcher at the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

More of Dr. Antonakakis' research papers can be found at:

https://www.damballa.com/downloads/a_pubs/Kopis.pdf

https://www.damballa.com/downloads/a_pubs/Damballa_Throw-Away_Traffic_to_Bots.pdf

Research scientists interested in working at Damballa should visit: https://www.damballa.com/company/employment.php

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About Damballa

As the experts in advanced threat protection, Damballa discovers active threats that bypass all security prevention layers. Damballa identifies evidence of malicious network traffic in real time, rapidly pinpointing the compromised devices that represent the highest risk.

Our patent-pending solutions automatically detect and terminate criminal activity, stopping data theft, minimizing business disruption, and reducing the time to response and remediation. Damballa protects any device or OS including PCs, Macs, Unix, iOS, Android, and embedded systems. Damballa protects more than 300 million endpoints globally at enterprises in every major market and for the world's largest ISP and telecommunications providers. For more information, visit www.damballa.com, or follow us on Twitter @DamballaInc.