03/2022 - present

Director/Principal & Lead Researcher - Cloud Native Security at Dynatrace, Arlington, Virginia, USA
- Leading the research team for Cloud Native Security
- Developing new leading-edge security technologies
- Defining the strategic research road map focused on cyber security topics

01/2018 - 02/2022

Principal Security Researcher - Threat Prevention at Palo Alto Networks, Santa Clara, CA, USA/Reston, VA, USA
R&D lead on machine learning based malware command and control traffic detection.

In the past I have been leading various projects in the following areas
- Automation of IPS signature generation
- Detection of malware Command and Control (C2) traffic over different protocols
- Application traffic profiling and identification with unsupervised machine learning
- Analysis and identification of evasive network traffic (e.g. evasive VPNs)

Further I am also working on various customer projects to increase the visibility on different network traffic types in the next generation firewall.

08/2013 - 01/2018

Graduate Researcher at Institute for Networking and Security Research, Penn State Universtiy, University Park, PA, USA
For my research work towards my Ph.D. degree I am analyzing security issues in virtualized networked environments and develop and implement prototyps to make systems including cloud platforms, virtual machines, enterprise and datacenter networks more secure.

08/2011 - 06/2013

Research and teaching assistant at Adaptive Networking Distributed Embeeded Systems Group, Universtiy of California, Merced, CA, USA
Before continuing my Phd at Penn State, I worked on Wireless Sensor Network Systems at the University of California, Merced. My work was focused on development and implementatin of Sensor Network based systems for energy efficiency in buildings and solar power plants. I was also teaching classes in Operating Systems, Computer Networks and Introduction into Programming in Java.

01/2011 - 05/2011

Software Engineer, Christian Doppler Laboratory, Vienna, Austria
I worked as a software engineer at the CDL Lab in Vienna on the development of software tools for the analysis and automation of systems engineering processes for complex software intensive automation processes.

10/2010 - 08/2011

Research assistant and lecturer, Department for Management Science, Vienna University of Technology, Vienna, Austria
For my master thesis I worked on the development of a web based system for the planning and control of financial instruments. I was also holding lectures in Applied Business Adminstration and Design of Enterprise Resource Planning Systems.

08/2003 - 04/2011

Freelancer/Founder
I started my first company when I was 18. I am working as a consultant and developer for software- and web-systems for multinational corporations (e.g. Sony Pictures, Nike) as well as small and medium sized companies in Germany and Austria. Currently I am also working on Android App development and enjoy being an entrepreneur.

05/2016 - 08/2016

Systems and Technology Engineering internship at Ericsson, San Jose, CA, USA
From May to August 2016 I worked for Ericsson in San Jose, CA as a systems and technology engineering intern. I developed a security/cryptography service module in C and OpenSSL for Ericsson's IPOS platform. The goal of this project was to make cryptography easy to use by automizing procedures such a key generation, sensitive data storage, crypto algorithm selection, etc. in an intelligent way.

05/2015 - 08/2015

Cyber Security Research internship at Vencore Labs (Applied Communication Sciences), Basking Ridge, NJ, USA
During my internship at Vencore Labs (Applied Communication Sciences) I developed a cyber deception system to hide and protect critical resources in enterprise networks. I implemented the system in the Python-based Software Defined Networking controller POX. The system further includes detection mechanisms to determine the source of adversarial traffic in a network.

05/2012 - 08/2012

IT and Technology Consulting intership at Accenture, Vienna, Austria
For 3 months in 2012 I worked in the IT Strategy, Infrastructure and Security group at Accenture. My tasks as an intern included data analysis and tool development in the project management office for the implementation of a backbone software infrastructure in a major European banking institute.

06/2008 - 08/2008

Software Engineering intership at Siemens, Vienna, Austria
During my internship I developed a testing and monitoring framework for a hospital data management platform developed by Siemens to manage and securely store images and data. I implemented remote functions in Java to monitor the information flow of the platform. I also developed a test framework for automated testing of the platform's Java and C functions in JUnit.