Analysts
Randy Abrams
Research Director Randy Abrams brings a wealth of experience in malware and virus research to the NSS Labs team. Previously, he was the Director of Technical Education for six years at ESET, a global antivirus company, and from 1993 to 2005, he worked at Microsoft where he developed and managed the processes to prevent their software from being released with malware.
Randy has presented at dozens of international security conferences, is often quoted in articles for several security publications, and has served on the board of directors for the Association of Antivirus Asia Researchers since 2000.
Randy is passionate about translating "geek speak" into understandable security education that the average computer user can use to enjoy a safer online experience.
Andrew Braunberg
For the last 18 years, Research Vice President Andrew Braunberg has focused on the market landscape, trends, and innovations in technology, initially as a technology journalist and then as Research Director at Current Analysis for the Business Technology and Software group.
His core areas of focus include enterprise mobility and network security. Andrew holds a BS from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Engineering Physics and an MA from George Washington University in Science, Technology, and Public Policy.
Joshua Mittler
Research Analyst Joshua Mittler brings to NSS Labs a solid background and academic training in interdisciplinary research. He is skilled in statistical analysis of large data sets, trend forecasting, and formulating practical solutions to complex problems. In addition, he has led quantitative and qualitative studies around change management, emergent leadership, and tolerance of ambiguity.
Joshua received his BA in Sociology from The University of Texas at Austin and an MS from Texas State University in Interdisciplinary Studies.
Paula Musich
Research Director Paula Musich brings over 25 years of experience covering the security and networking technology markets, first as a veteran reporter with eWEEk/PC Week and Network World, and later as principal analyst for enterprise security with Current Analysis. As a security technology analyst, Paula has tracked and analyzed competitive developments in the threat management segment of the information security market, ranging from anti-malware to firewalls, IPS, DLP, content security, and more.
Paula received her BA in Journalism & Mass Communication from the University of Wisconsin and an MS from Boston University in Public Relations.
Jason Pappalexis
Research Director Jason Pappalexis has more than 15 years of experience in the security industry, holding roles with leading antivirus and cloud-based security vendors, as well as with the US government. He has also provided extensive HTTP/SMTP capacity testing and security guidance for Fortune 500 companies. His research at NSS Labs has focused on perimeter security, continuous forensic analytics, breach detection, virtualization, and systems management.
Jason recent papers discuss an adaptive approach to security' the need to evolve incident response, the challenges of securing data in the cloud' and the complexities of feature consolidation. He presented his NSS paper "Adaptive Security for Business Continuity" at RSA 2015 in San Francisco.
Jason graduated with a master’s degree and honors in mechanical engineering, with a focus on computational fluid dynamics (applied mathematics). He is a Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP) and a Certified Security Compliance Specialist (CSCS).
Jayendra Pathak
Jayendra Pathak, Senior Director of Engineering, brings a wealth of expertise in malware, phishing, and exploit analysis. Jayendra and his team maintain a comprehensive database of threats prevalent in the wild and have built an automated live testing infrastructure that runs with minimal supervision. Along with NSS Labs Researcher Mohamed Saher, he also built an exploit-hunting tool — BaitNET — which gathers real-time intelligence on these exploits.
Prior to NSS Labs, he was a research assistant at University of Houston where he was pursuing his MS degree. A native of Nepal, Jayendra worked as a computer engineer for the government of Nepal for 4 years prior to coming to United States.
A true researcher, Jayendra's hobby is to scan the Internet for threats and try to determine how those threats affect users. He has a BE in computer engineering from Nepal Engineering College and an MS in Management Information System from University of Houston.
Mohamed Saher
Mohamed Saher is Vice President of Advanced Research, specializing in reverse engineering, windows internals, and mathematics. His work and research spans numerous areas, including native software protection, copy protection technologies, compilers and virology. In his spare time he enjoys contributing to various reverse engineering forums and solving crackmes and math problems in Project Euler where he is top-ranked nationally and internationally.
Mike Spanbauer
Vice President of Research Mike Spanbauer, a recognized leader in security and infrastructure technologies, leads the analyst team in creating research that combines years of testing experience with quantitative analysis of the world’s leading security companies, products and markets. In addition to running the research organization, he also advises clients on how best to address today’s cybersecurity threats.
Prior to joining NSS, Mike was Service Director at Current Analysis, managing the Business Technology and Software group which monitored, analyzed, and advised on application platforms, collaboration platforms, data center technology, enterprise mobility technology, enterprise networking, enterprise security, and unified communications and contact centers. Previously, he spent nearly 15 years at Hewlett-Packard where he established and managed competitive intelligence programs networking hardware and in network management software.
Mike is well respected within the enterprise and carrier communities for his comprehensive insights into the domains and management of cloud, networking, cybersecurity and software-defined networking. He has spoken at multiple industry events as a subject matter expert.
Thomas Skybakmoen
Research Vice President Thomas Skybakmoen worked for Gartner for more than 5 years, most recently as a Senior Research Analyst, writing research for thousands of clients in the IT industry and often speaking at Gartner conferences with press and customers — from C-level executives to enterprise architects — about the IT challenges enterprises face today, particularly around PaaS and SaaS.
Prior to NSS Labs, Thomas served as VP of Marketing & Product Strategy for Thru LLC. He also holds a degree in marketing from Norwegian School of Management, with additional course work at the Walter A. Haas School of Business at the University of California Berkeley.
Bhaarath Venkateswaran
Bhaarath Venkateswaran is a Practice Director and has over 10 years of information security and network engineering experience. Before joining NSS Labs, he led the product and information security assurance group at Trustwave, where he designed and implemented the performance and security evaluation methodologies across all their network security product offerings.
Prior to Trustwave, Bhaarath was a principal security engineer at ATW and a security engineer at Lucid Security specializing in firewall, IPS, UTM, and other security technologies. He is the published author of a book on Internet security titled "Adaptive Internet Threat Forecasting" and is an active member of several security organizations. Bhaarath holds a master's degree in engineering specializing in network security from Temple University and a management degree in Information Sciences from the Fox School of Business.
Bob Walder
As Founder and Chief Technology Officer, Bob Walder leads both the research direction and overall product strategy for NSS Labs. With over 30 years experience in the computer industry, Bob is known for the development of the industry's most advanced testing methodologies and for shaping NSS into the world’s leading information security research and third-party testing organization.
Having previously worked in various senior IT roles in software, manufacturing, and banking industries, Bob moved into technology journalism and later became a Research Director at Gartner on the Security, Privacy & Risk team. Since founding NSS, Bob has performed important cybersecurity research on network infrastructure protection, threat management, and intrusion prevention.