Category: C-Suite
Name: Tom Cross
Title: CTO
Company: OPAQ
Why Nominated: Tom Cross has performed every role in IT security to include advocate, inventor, organizer and speaker. Since the mid 1990s, Cross has not only founded both companies, organizations and even a blogging community.
Profile: Tom Cross has held his current role since May 2017, but in 1995 co-founded the EFGA (Electronic Frontiers Georgia) and followed that a year later when he co-founded Computer Sentry Software, known for their award-winning "CyberAngel" software, a laptop anti-theft program. From 1999 to 2000, he was chief engineer at Dataway, a computer security firm in San Francisco.
From 2000 to 2001 he worked at iAsiaWorks, as the director of global security engineering. In 2001, he founded Industrial Memetics, which developed the popular collaborative blogging community MemeStreams. Cross was previously Director of Security Research at Lancope and Manager of IBM Internet Security Systems X-Force Advanced Research team. He invented endpoint micro segmentation security as CTO of Drawbridge Networks.
What colleagues say: "Tom's got a brilliant mind and is an asset to any security research organization."
- Robert Freeman, senior manager, Watson Security Research, IBM