Engin Kirda

Engin Kirda is an Expert Affiliate of the Rising Powers Initiative at the Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future, and holds the posts of professor of Computer Science at Northeastern University in Boston and executive director of the Northeastern Ciybersecurity and Privacy Institute. Before that, he held faculty positions at Institute Eurecom in the French Riviera and the Technical University of Vienna, where he co-founded the Secure Systems Lab that is now distributed over five institutions in Europe and the U.S.

Dr. Kirda’s research has focused on malware analysis (e.g., Anubis, Exposure, and Fire) and detection, web application security, and practical aspects of social networking security. He co-authored more than 150 peer-reviewed scholarly publications and served on the program committees of numerous well-known international conferences and workshops.

Dr. Kirda was the program chair of the International Symposium on Recent Advances in Intrusion Detection (RAID) in 2009, the program chair of the European Workshop on Systems Security (Eurosec) in 2010 and 2011, the program chair of the well-known USENIX Workshop on Large Scale Exploits and Emergent Threats in 2012, the program chair of the security flagship conference Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS) in 2015 and USENIX Security in 2017.

In the past, Dr. Kirda has consulted the European Commission on emerging threats, and recently gave a Congressional Briefing in Washington D.C. on advanced malware attacks and cyber-security. He also spoke at SXSW Interactive 2015 about “Malware in the Wild” and at Blackhat 2015. Besides his roles at Northeastern, Dr. Kirda was a co-founder of Lastline, Inc., a Silicon-Valley based company that specialized in the detection and prevention of advanced targeted malware and that was acquired by VMWare in 2020.