Alexander Saint Croix

Summary

I grew up building the World Wide Web. I built my first web site when I was a kid in 1993, and I was hooked. As a college freshman at the University of Minnesota in '98, I taught interactive multimedia. In the dot com boom I worked as a designer and developer for various startups to pay my way through school. Afterward, I studied English writing, and worked full time at the Office of Information Technology, during the era of the CodeRed, Nimda, SQL Slammer, and Blaster worms. I delivered the salutatory address for my graduating class at the College of Liberal Arts in December of 2003. It was a great honor. After graduation, I became active in the budding Open Source Java community as a developer and writer, before returning to the Office of Information Technology (OIT) full time in August 2004. There, I built and trained a threat response team to halt malware campaigns at the University. We promoted a culture of safe computing that persists today. In 2006 and 2007, I served on the University's Innovation Fellows board. By 2008, I was a full time OIT Network Analyst and computer science graduate student. In grad school, I studied network and information security, network design, machine learning, information visualization, and conducted research on social trust networks. In 2011 I moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan, to work for Arbor Networks on their ASERT team, focusing on cyber threat intelligence data engineering until 2015. I joined Cisco Systems as a senior engineering lead in 2015, and helped build Cisco Threat Response, which became the SecureX platform. I spent six years helping bootstrap a security startup within Cisco, and building a platform to integrate every product in the Cisco Security Group. My role was a mix of technical and people leadership, Clojure development, data modeling and data engineering for cyber threat intelligence. Later I incorporated product owner responsibilities to help guide product vision, strategy, and roadmap development. In February 2022 I left Cisco to build cognitive exoskeletons for cyber security startup Command Zero. My entire professional life has revolved around securing and defending the Internet, the Web, and its users. Building an immune system for the world's information networks is my mission and purpose.