Shape Security Hires WildFire Creator Dr. Xinran Wang as Chief Security Scientist

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA--(Marketwired - Oct 3, 2013) - Shape Security, a startup developing a new type of web security technology, today announced that Dr. Xinran Wang has joined the company as chief security scientist. Wang will drive research and development efforts and help strengthen the company's cyber-attack research team. Founded in 2011 by leaders from Google, the Pentagon, and major defense contractors, Shape has assembled a highly accomplished team. Over the past year, the company has recruited several key executives, including Google's former click fraud czar and Cisco's former VP of application delivery.

Wang joins the team from Palo Alto Networks, where he headed malware research and led the design and development of the WildFire product. With over nine years of experience in security research and 14 patents in crimeware, botnet, and malicious domain/IP detection, he is an authority on modern malware detection. Wang has been invited to speak at top security conferences including Black Hat, Virus Bulletin, Usenix security, and the ACM conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS). His academic papers have been cited over 500 times.

"As the driving force behind Palo Alto Networks' WildFire technology, Dr. Wang is one of the most talented security scientists in the world," said Shape Security CEO Derek Smith. "After seeing him build a strong competitor in the anti-malware space from scratch, we knew we wanted to have him at Shape. As our chief security scientist, his work will ensure that our technology handles attacks which today cannot be defended against by any other products."

Wang previously started a company (http://dayzerosystems.com) based on his doctoral research while attending Pennsylvania State University, where he earned a Ph.D. in computer science with a focus on system and software security. Earlier in his career, he was a software engineer at IBM.

"Shape's technology is going to completely change how companies implement, and even how they think about, security," said Dr. Wang. "I am excited to join such an amazing team and work on such an interesting set of new and challenging problems."

About Shape Security
Based in Mountain View, California, Shape Security is a startup developing a new category of web security products. The company has raised $26 million in Series A and B funding from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Venrock, Google Ventures, Allegis Capital, Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt's TomorrowVentures, former Symantec CEO Enrique Salem, and top executives from LinkedIn, Twitter, Square, and Dropbox. Shape has a world-class team hailing from Google, the Pentagon, Cisco, VMware, major defense contractors, and other leading corporations. The company's patent-pending technology will provide customers with a fundamentally better approach to protecting websites against modern web attacks. Shape is hiring. Visit http://shapesecurity.com to learn more.