SynSaber appoints Mark Weatherford and Ali Golshan to its Advisory Board

SynSaber announced the appointment of distinguished cybersecurity leaders Mark Weatherford and Ali Golshan to its advisory board.

With more than two decades of experience each in the field of information security and in leadership positions at some of the world’s leading cybersecurity organizations, Weatherford and Golshan bring a wealth of experience in technology and business growth strategy, as well as added depth and breadth to SynSaber’s already impressive well of expertise.

In addition to the current positions he holds as CSO at AlertEnterprise and as the chief strategy officer and board member at the National Cybersecurity Center, Weatherford has served in a variety of executive-level cybersecurity and advisory positions, including chief cybersecurity strategist (and current advisory board member) for vArmour, global information security strategist for Booking Holdings, chief security officer at the North American Electric Reliability Corporation, and was the first chief information security officer for both California and Colorado.

Additionally, Weatherford served as the deputy under secretary for cybersecurity at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security under the Obama administration.

“Reduced visibility due to proprietary technologies has always been a limiting factor in understanding what is happening inside industrial control system environments. SynSaber is taking a unique approach to industrial control system security that isn’t just another security feature in the increasingly crowded landscape of security products,” said Weatherford. “The founders of SynSaber are former ICS engineers and operators who have been on the ground and understand the challenges of trying to squeeze information out of complex products. They get it, and I’m happy to be part of the SynSaber team.”

Ali Golshan is the Co-founder and CEO of Gretel.ai, a privacy engineering company focused on data classification and synthetic data. Prior to Gretel.ai, Ali was Co-founder and CTO of StackRox, (acquired by Red Hat), and before that he was the Co-founder and CTO of Cyphort. Ali started his career in government, where he conducted security and vulnerability research for the intelligence community and assisted with issues related to designing resilient infrastructure.

“The SynSaber team is building an elegant and powerful solution to fill the existing gap in operational and information technology systems and critical infrastructure defense,” said Golshan. “The trends towards more processing at the edge mean that it’s important to design with scale in mind, and SynSaber is doing that in a groundbreaking way. I see incredible potential in the SynSaber product, and I am thrilled to be joining the advisory board as their innovative team works towards taking their solution to market.”

“Mark and Ali are illustrious cybersecurity leaders who have long been on the forefront of cyber threat intelligence and protection work as well as business leadership,” said Jori VanAntwerp, SynSaber CEO and co-founder. “As preeminent cybersecurity professionals, and with their extensive backgrounds serving in an advisory capacity for multiple cybersecurity technology companies, they each have a wealth of experience and incredibly successful track records to bring to the table. It is truly an honor to welcome them to the SynSaber advisory board and we look forward to their contributions.”

Launched in July of this year, SynSaber is developing a technology-agnostic solution that enables simple, effective, low-hardware, low-hassle asset and network monitoring that provides continuous insight and awareness into the status, vulnerabilities and threats across every point in the industrial ecosystem, including IIoT, cloud and on-premises.

SynSaber is now accepting applicants from companies within the energy, utilities, manufacturing, and oil and gas sectors to join its closed beta program. Organizations joining the program will receive early access to the ultra-small ICS sensor technology and will have an opportunity to help shape the future of industrial security.