Marc Rogers joins Q-Net Security as CSO
St. Louis, MO-based hardware cybersecurity firm Q-Net Security announced on October 27 that Marc Rogers – internationally-renowned ‘white hat’ hacker and member of the US Ransomware Taskforce – has joined the team as chief security officer (CSO).
Rogers has been a key figure in the world of information security since the late 1980s, both as an ethical hacker and as a cybersecurity expert. He brings specialized and vast security knowledge to Q-Net – a company designing innovative, high-security cybersecurity solutions for defense and critical infrastructure, such as utilities and communications networks.
Rogers’ distinguished and varied career has included hacking Apple’s TouchID and the Tesla Model S; revealing vulnerabilities to ultimately make the systems more secure for both the companies and their users. He is also well-known for his work on television, including technical support for USA Network’s ‘Mr. Robot’, helping create hacks for the show, and regularly featuring on the BBC series ‘The Real Hustle’ as an on-screen expert and designer of technical scams.
Prior to Q-Net Security, Rogers was senior director of cybersecurity strategy for Okta, and the head of security for Cloudflare. Q-Net will also be Rogers’ second time building a security company – he spent time in South Korea as a CISO, then later moved to Silicon Valley to co-found the disruptive security company Vectra.
Rogers is head of security for the world’s largest hacking conference, DEF CON, where he has been an organizer and champion for safety and equality for 25 years. More recently, he also gained recognition for co-founding the CTI League, as a response to the global pandemic. The CTI League is a collective of professionals, government agencies and law enforcement from 80 different countries who work together to protect the medical sector and other life-saving organizations from cyberattacks. For this work he and his co-founders were named as Wired Magazine’s ‘People Making Things Better in 2020’.
Q-Net Security CEO Dr. Ron Indeck said the appointment was a major advantage for the company, as Rogers was highly trusted across the many expanses of the global cybersecurity community.
“As Q-Net seeks to entice customers away from traditional software security models to a hardware offering, Marc’s breadth of expertise and insight is proving indispensable,” Indeck said.
Rogers said he was drawn to Q-Net Security because they were “doing something quite different from the norm,” and had created an offering that was “extremely secure, and better than anything else in the marketplace.”
“For quite a few years, the security landscape has seen a big push to move from hardware into software. While this has driven great scalability and major improvements in agility and interconnectability, it has also introduced substantial complexity – simultaneously creating a vast, often unmapped attack surface. When you’re dealing with extremely sensitive services – such as critical infrastructure – that’s the opposite of what’s needed,” Rogers said.
“Having a very small attack surface, and using hardware to create an environment that is difficult to compromise – which is Q-Net’s approach – is better both in terms of performance, and in terms of security. I would say that describes my approach to things: I like thinking that is outside of the box, which challenges what’s considered ‘normal’, in order to deliver a better solution. I guess that’s probably the hacker mentality: we like things that go against the grain,” he said.
Source: Q-Net Security
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