Founder and CEO,

Having worked in different corners of the industry for over 30 years, Kevin Mandia is a force to be reckoned with in cybersecurity. He joined the US Air Force in 1992, where he spent the outset of his career at the Pentagon as a Computer Security Officer before becoming a Special Agent for the Air Force Office of Special Investigations.

Upon leaving the military, Mandia spent two years as Director of Training for Sytex/Lockheed Martin and three as Director of Foundstone, before going on to found Mandiant in 2004.

Mandiant as part of Google Cloud

Mandiant’s journey from conception to cybersecurity giant over the next two decades may be an ongoing story, but it has definitely caught the sector’s attention, becoming part of Google Cloud in 2022 while retaining Mandia as CEO.

Despite Mandian experts boasting 99% resolutions without incident response and an average of less than five minutes from alert to triage, at the inaugural Mandiant mWise conference in 2022, Mandia professed that “we should never rest, we should maintain constant vigilance” as “wherever money goes, crime follows”.

“The Mandiant brand is synonymous with unmatched insights for organisations seeking to keep themselves secure in a constantly changing environment,” Google Cloud’s CEO, Thomas Kurian, told Cyber Magazine last year. “Together, we can make a profound impact in securing the cloud, accelerating the adoption of cloud computing, and, ultimately, make the world safer.”

Mandia echoes him: “Google Cloud shares our mission-driven culture to bring security to every organisation.”

The focus on cybersecurity is in-line with the international increase of attacks: since COVID-19 and the increase in staff working from home, the FBI have reported an increase of 300% in reported cybercrimes.

Education

Mandia started his journey into cyber at Lafayette College, where he completed his Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from 1988 –1992, before moving to The George Washington University in 1993 to accomplish a Master of Science in Forensic Science. In 2013, he went back to education, completing the Owner/President Management Program at Harvard Business School.

Alongside his work within Mandiant, Mandia is a founding partner of Ballistic Ventures where he mentors entrepreneurs on their journey into cybersecurity; he has served as a member of the Cybersecurity Advisory Committee for the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency since December 2021; and he is on the Board of Directors for Cohesity, a next-gen data management company. In 2014, he co-authored his book ‘Incident Response and Computer Forensics’.

International Cyber Espionage

Mandiant rose to international prominence in 2013, when it created a lengthy report summarising seven years of work, which described how the Chinese government had been digitally infiltrating the US. The report, led by Mandia, offered details of theft towards 147 Western corporations across 20 industries by a Chinese military unit, known as the hacking groups ‘Comment Crew’ or ‘Shanghai Group’. The Chinese response was defensive; they denied the accusations and accused Mandiant of attempting a largescale publicity stunt. Although not created for recognition, the report did propel Mandiant to national news: on February 19th 2013 the front cover of the New York Times read “Chinese Army Unit Is Seen as Tied to Hacking Against U.S.” and reported on the “unusually detailed

60-page study by Mandiant”. The Forbes’ article headline read “The CEO who caught the Chinese spies red-handed” and compares Mandia to Amazon Founder Jeff Bezos. It also put a target on the ex-Air Force CEO and his company, with him even joking to the New York Times journalist “if anything happens, I expect to be avenged properly”, during their interview before publication.

A decade later, however, Mandiant is still going from strength to strength, now a part of one of the world’s foremost digital companies and still headed by Mandia, manning the front lines of the ever-expanding digital world.