Agari has announced that Dr. Markus Jakobsson has joined the company as chief scientist. He will lead Agari’s security research with a focus on using data science to prevent advanced email attacks.
Jakobsson brings more than 20 years of experience as a cybersecurity researcher and scientist studying phishing, crimeware and mobile security at organizations including PayPal, Xerox PARC and RSA Security.
“With visibility of 10 billion emails per day and 70 percent of the world’s inboxes, the Agari Email Trust Network provides a wealth of data on e-mail behavior and threats,” said Ravi Khatod, CEO, Agari. “Markus is the ideal research leader for our world-class data science team, who are driving the move away from detection approaches that are always one step behind to cybersecurity technology that prevents advanced email attacks by modeling trusted email behavior.”
Jakobsson has held key positions as principal Scientist at PayPal, Xerox PARC and RSA Security. Jakobsson also co-founded three digital security startups spanning email fraud prevention, user authentication, mobile malware detection and secure user messaging.
“As one of the early researchers of phishing and crimeware, I am passionate about preventing the costliest cybersecurity threat to organizations today: advanced email threats such as spear phishing and business email compromise. Agari is unique in its ability to use data analytics and machine learning to build trust models that reflect the behavioral pattern of legitimate email, categorize untrusted email and stop attacks,” said Jakobsson.
As an academic researcher, Jakobsson served as an Associate Professor at Indiana University and Adjunct Associate Professor at New York University. He holds more than 100 patents and has published more than 100 peer-reviewed conference and journal articles. He has a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of California in San Diego, as well as master’s degrees from both the University of California at San Diego and Lund University in Sweden.
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