Abstract:

Established in 2009 in the Netherlands as a University spin-off by a Professor and two PhD students, SecurityMatters was acquired in 2018 by the American ForeScout Technologies Inc. (NASDAQ:FCST). SecurityMatters pioneered a new way of realizing network monitoring for cybersecurity that proved very successful in the Critical Infrastructure domain (Oil and Gas, Power Generation, Energy Distribution etc.). Besides a success story, SecurityMatters has also represented an enormous learning experience, benchmarking different approaches against reality. In this lecture, one of the founders of SecurityMatters will give his unsweetened  opinion regarding what works and what does not work, when it comes to network monitoring. 

Bio:

Sandro Etalle is an entrepreneur and a full professor and head of the Security group at the TU Eindhoven. He earned his PhD at the University of Amsterdam (1995). Before switching to the academic career he was co-founder of two Italian technology companies: TecLogic and ICON (www.icon.it). In 2009, Etalle founded SecurityMatters (www.secmatters.com) together with PhD students D. Bolzoni and E. Zambon.  At SecurityMatters, Etalle served as CEO for over 4 years and as Chairman of the Board until the exit. SecurityMatters factually changed the way of monitoring Industrial Systems and maintaining a leadership position in its segment. At the TU Eindhoven, Etalle leads the TU/e Security and Embedded Networked Systems section, counting over 40 employees, and the Security group, which is part of it.  Beyond the TU/e, Etalle is a Visiting Professor at the University of Trento and Lecturer at the Bologna Business School.