Awake Security Bolsters Exec Team with Darktrace and McAfee Alums

By STS News Desk On Dec 11, 2018

Awake Security Bolsters Exec Team with Darktrace and McAfee Alums

VP of Sales and VP of Product Management Join Advanced Network Traffic Analysis Company to Help Cybersecurity Teams Detect Malicious Intent

Awake Security, the only advanced network traffic analysis company powered by the expertise of the world’s foremost investigators, strengthened its leadership team by adding two executives with deep cybersecurity experience at companies including Darktrace and McAfee. Randy Cheek, a former SVP of sales at Darktrace, joins Awake as VP of sales, and Rajdeep Wadhwa, who was most recently VP of product management at SS8, joins the company as VP of product management.

These key hires strengthen a team of multidisciplinary experts who joined Awake from cybersecurity’s most venerable companies to help stop the increasingly prevalent threat posed by non-malware based attacks that blend with business-justified activity. This growing team is led by former Cylance CTO Rahul Kashyap, who was appointed CEO of Awake Securityin July to guide the company through rapid growth driven by the need for solutions that can detect and stop these modern threats.

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“Cyber criminals have gotten very savvy at weaponizing the tools that organizations rely upon for normal business, making malicious activity extremely difficult to detect,” said Kashyap. “Through deep insight provided by advanced network traffic analysis, and capturing knowledge from the world’s most experienced investigators, Awake is disrupting traditional approaches to cybersecurity. This is what drew me to Awake and it’s what has allowed us to draw talented individuals like Randy and Rajdeep. Their experience is highly relevant and valuable to Awake as we work towards delivering value to a broader set of customers across the globe.”

Before joining Awake, Randy Cheek held multiple roles in enterprise technology sales including nearly five years at Darktrace. He joined Darktrace five months after the company was founded and ultimately became SVP of sales. He also held various sales roles at Hewlett Packard.

“My time leading sales at Darktrace gave me the opportunity to closely interact with customers and really understand the challenges that their security teams face on a daily basis,” said Cheek. “It’s easy to see the promise that Awake brings to solving those challenges with its unique artificial intelligence approach. The company is on a growth trajectory that’s very similar to what I’ve experienced and fueled in the past, and I look forward to fostering and extending it.”

Rajdeep Wadhwa comes to Awake after seven years at SS8, where he was most recently VP of product management, leading threat research and product strategy for the company’s network security and communication analytics solutions. Prior to SS8, Wadhwa spent more than six years at McAfee driving demand for the company’s Network Data Loss Prevention product line.

“Network data is becoming an increasingly important tool that can help fight cyberattacks no matter where they come from or how they’re executed because it provides empirical evidence of all activity,” said Wadhwa. “Awake has built an extremely unique solution that uses this evidence in a way that only the most experienced investigators could before, and I can’t wait to work more closely with the company’s exceptional team to advance this technology even more.”

In his new role, Wadhwa will build on more than three years of research and development with Fortune 500 development partners that’s behind Awake’s platform and its most recent product release, which includes support for cloud environments and internet of things (IoT) devices, among other enhancements.

The Awake Security Platform is an advanced network traffic analysis (NTA) solution designed to help organizations combat sophisticated cyber threats and improve overall visibility. Awake’s exhaustive intelligence is built on 360-degree visibility and a deep understanding of the business entities in an organization. Through analysis of every communication between these entities, Awake’s enhanced network detection and response platform better detects mal-intent and attacks that blend in with business-justified activity. This empowers security teams to stop insider attacks, credential abuse, lateral movement, data exfiltration, and more.

Wadhwa and Cheek join an executive team that has helped build some of the most widely-used and category-defining enterprise IT and security products. This includes Gary Golomb, who was one of the first employees at Cylance; Debabrata Dash, who was an early member and the analytics architect for the ArcSight engineering team; Keith Amidon, who was director of engineering at Nicira Networks (acquired by VMware) and co-founder of IntruVert Networks (acquired by McAfee); Brad Kingsbury, who was SVP of product at Symantec and VP of engineering and CTO at McAfee; and Rudolph Araujo, who was VP of product and solutions marketing at FireEye.