SEATTLE, February 15, 2022 – DomainTools, the leading provider of DNS-based cyber threat intelligence, today announced expansion of its executive team to accelerate its worldwide market growth, including Ben April, chief architect; Dr. Sean McNee, chief technology officer (CTO); Chris Nelson, chief revenue officer (CRO); and Daniel Schwalbe, chief information security officer (CISO) and vice president of information technology.
In November of 2021, DomainTools acquired Farsight Security Inc., expanding real-time, predictive threat intelligence capabilities for proactive defense against emerging threats. The company recently announced its enhanced technology available in Iris Detect, an innovative new product designed to discover and monitor domain names spoofing brands, trademarks, or other domains with unprecedented speed, accuracy, and comprehensiveness.
“We’re looking forward to a year of significant growth for the company, driven by innovative research and development and increased global adoption of our solutions, both organically and through new business and technology partnerships. This is the right time to expand our leadership team as we build on the best-in-class data and solutions pioneered by DomainTools and Farsight.” said Tim Chen, CEO, DomainTools.
The newly announced executives are:
Ben April, chief architect – April is responsible for ensuring DomainTools delivers on its promise of unprecedented speed, accuracy, and comprehensiveness of data. Previously CTO at Farsight Security Inc., April also served at Trend Micro, where he became the Americas regional manager of the Forward-looking Threat Research team. He has presented to security conferences on six continents, on topics including Bitcoin, NFC, operational security, and infrastructure security. April has built research systems for collecting and aggregating data from Whois and the Bitcoin block-chain to the global routing table. He is dedicated to eliminating the technical and policy barriers that impede data-sharing among white-hat security researchers. April is also a volunteer sysadmin and coder for trusted community security projects.
Dr. Sean McNee, chief technology officer (CTO) – Prior to his appointment as CTO, McNee served as data scientist, and director of research, at DomainTools. Over his career, he has harnessed the power of machine learning and visual analytics to help people find the information they need to make better decisions, including academics, attorneys, and threat hunters & network defenders. McNee received his PhD from the University of Minnesota where he researched personalization and recommender systems. For his research contributions, he was a winner of the 2010 ACM Software Systems Award. McNee holds six patents, and two pending.
Chris Nelson, chief revenue officer (CRO) – Nelson is responsible for sales, marketing, and customer support to drive international growth, including restructuring the company’s OEM, channel and alliance partner programs. With more than 25 years of go-to-market leadership experience, Nelson focuses on listening to what customers and partners need, and matching that outcome to the appropriate technology solutions. Prior to joining DomainTools, he held executive leadership roles at Kogniz, Inc, Zerto, Inc. and Hitachi Ventara. Nelson holds a BA in Communications, Journalism and Information Technology from Penn State University.
Daniel Schwalbe, chief information security officer (CISO) and vice president of information technology – Schwalbe also comes to DomainTools from Farsight Security Inc. and is a proven information security and privacy leader with over 20 years of operational and strategic information security practice in startup, higher education, government, and large enterprise. He is responsible for implementing and executing an information security program tailored to protect the company’s data assets, information systems, and intellectual property, as well as data governance and management, and end user support. Schwalbe is a US Army Veteran and a former member of the FBI Cybercrimes Task Force. He holds a BA in Communications from the University of Washington.
About DomainTools
DomainTools, backed by global investment firm Battery Ventures, empowers security professionals to get ahead of attacks by identifying attacker infrastructure, getting immediate context and visibility on threats, and making faster risk assessments, thereby dramatically improving the security posture of their organization. Fortune 1000 companies, global government agencies, and leading security solution vendors use the DomainTools platform as a critical ingredient in their threat investigation and mitigation work. Learn more about how to connect the dots on malicious activity at https://www.domaintools.com or follow us on Twitter: @domaintools.
