SANTA CLARA, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--AttackIQ™, the leading, independent player in the emerging market of continuous security validation, today announced Dariush Afshar has joined the company’s executive team as vice president of business development and corporate strategy.
“The security market has been struggling for years to help its customers calculate ROI and prove product efficacy, but AttackIQ is now in a unique position to help our technology partners accomplish this with unparalleled ease,” said Brett Galloway, chief executive officer of AttackIQ. “Over the course of his 20-year career, Dariush has established himself as a highly effective, value-adding operator, making him the perfect executive to spearhead AttackIQ’s business development and strategy efforts. His proven track record includes an understanding and appreciation for the cybersecurity landscape, customer pain points and the partner ecosystem.”
Prior to AttackIQ, Dariush held executive roles at Aruba Networks (Hewlett Packard Enterprise), Cisco Systems, McKinsey & Co. and a number of early-stage, venture backed startups where he contributed to rapid growth and subsequent acquisition. His experience spans the enterprise security, wireless networking, enterprise software, and consumer internet sectors, at a wide range of companies from 4-person startups to Fortune 500 companies. He has extensive experience in corporate and strategic business development, including designing, scaling, and managing partner ecosystems of hundreds of cybersecurity partners that deliver substantial value for the business. He’s also led mergers and acquisitions transactions, corporate strategy, and OEM strategic alliances.
“AttackIQ has distinguished itself with its customer-first approach to an incredibly common, yet unaddressed problem faced by every single business connected to the web. Instead of only offering security in the cloud, this is security for the cloud,” said Afshar. “Customers have been craving a neutral, independent perspective on their cybersecurity portfolio for a long time. We’re ‘Switzerland’- committed to neutrality. AttackIQ has brought a sea change to the field, elevating how cyber vendors serve their customers, by leveraging the power of its open platform to deliver unprecedented transparency tools for customers. I’m excited to join AttackIQ on this journey.”
AttackIQ heavily leverages the MITRE ATT&CK framework which acts as a playbook for the cybersecurity industry, offering a vast knowledge base that allows organizations to clearly see the steps of complex attacks and what procedures are linked to a specific adversary behavior. This cybersecurity lexicon levels the playing field for security teams, letting analysts and purple teams see specific trends between attacks and adversary styles. It allows security executives to think systematically about the environment in which they must establish a security program and to determine if security dollar spend is effective in preventing or detecting all known attacker behaviors. With the broadest implementation of the MITRE ATT&CK framework, AttackIQ provides enterprises of all sizes the ability to automate the assessment of their cyber readiness.
Since emerging from stealth mode in 2016, AttackIQ has helped its mid-market and large enterprise customers test and measure the effectiveness of their security defenses. AttackIQ boasts customers in the finance, government and cloud-computing sectors that have all improved their security postures and prevented attacks using the AttackIQ platform. The company’s unique approach helps organizations determine the effectiveness of their current security tools, products and processes by identifying baseline readiness, overlaps and gaps in defenses.
"We see tremendous value in partnering with AttackIQ. Together, we can give customers immediate insight into their security controls, validating what is working and identifying where there might be issues. As a result, we help our customers to make more informed decisions about their security portfolio," said Ryan Permeh, Chief Security Architect, BlackBerry (NYSE: BB).”
Afshar holds a bachelor's degree in business administration from Georgetown University, a joint M.B.A. and M.A from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, and he was a Fulbright Scholar to France and a Mitchell Scholar to Ireland.
About AttackIQ
AttackIQ, a leader in the emerging market of continuous security validation, built the industry’s first platform that enables red and blue teams to test and measure the effectiveness of their security controls and staff. With an open platform, AttackIQ supports the MITRE ATT&CK framework, a curated knowledge base and model for cyber adversary behavior used for planning security improvements and verifying defenses work as expected. AttackIQ’s platform is trusted by leading companies around the world. For more information visit www.attackiq.com. Follow AttackIQ on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Vimeo, and YouTube.
