About Us
Wombat Security Technologies was founded to commercialize products originally developed at Carnegie Mellon University as part of one of the largest anti-phishing research projects in the US. Our enterprise-ready solutions have grown out of peer-reviewed scientific work conducted by leading researchers in the field and have been tested in the laboratory and the real world. Our technologies have been used in sectors as diverse as finance and banking, government, defense, ISPs, health care, and education. They address both the technical and human side of the phishing problem, enabling organizations to implement a pragmatic and effective approach to combating phishing attacks.
Management Team
Norman Sadeh, Chairman, CEO and Co-Founder
Norman has held leadership positions in education and government and consulted extensively for corporate and government organizations in the US and abroad. He is a Professor in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), where he developed Wombat's anti-phishing filtering technology. He is also co-founder and co-director of the School of Computer Science's PhD program in Computation, Organizations and Society and of the School's MBA Track in Technology Leadership set up jointly with the Tepper School of Business. In the late nineties, Norman worked as program manager with the European Commission's ESPRIT program, where he was in charge of a $40M portfolio of R&D projects, including a $13M initiative in innovative software tools for education and training. He later served for two years as Chief Scientist of the European Commission's US$700M initiative in "New Methods of Work and eCommerce". Norman holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University, a M.Sc. in Computer Science from the University of Southern California, and a B.S./M.Sc. degree in electrical engineering and applied physics from Brussels Free University.
William (Bill) Ferguson, Chief Operating Officer
William (Bill) Ferguson brings extensive strategy, business development, marketing, and operations experience to Wombat, having held leadership positions with both national and multi-national IT organizations over the past 15 years. In some of his prior roles, he served as Partner, CIO and VP of Business Development. Between 2002 and 2007, Bill was affiliated with Carnegie Mellon University, serving among other things as Executive Director of the University’s Chief Information Officer Institute and also playing a key role developing and shaping the Corporate Partnership Program of Carnegie Mellon’s $50+M CyLab, one of the largest university-based Cybersecurity Research and Education Centers in the US. He is a regular speaker at national information technology, security and privacy conferences and has been active in organizations. such as the National Association of State CIOs (NASCIO), the Pittsburgh CIO Group, the Federal Government CIO University, and the Pittsburgh CIO Forum. He earned an MBA at Robert Morris College and received his BS in Information Science from the University of Pittsburgh. Bill also holds an Executive CSO Certificate and a Federal CIO Certificate and has Secret Clearance (DoD).
Jason Hong, CTO and Co-Founder
Jason joined the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University in 2004 as an assistant professor in the Human Computer Interaction Institute. He works in the areas of ubiquitous computing and usable privacy and security, focusing on location-based services, anti-phishing, mobile social computing, and end-user programming. He is also an author of the book The Design of Sites (Addison-Wesley, 2001), a pattern-based approach to designing customer-centered web sites. He received his PhD from Berkeley and his undergraduate degrees from Georgia Institute of Technology.
Lorrie Cranor, Chief Scientist and Co-Founder
Lorrie is an Associate Professor in the School of Computer Science and the department of Engineering and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University. She is director of the CMU Usable Privacy and Security Laboratory (CUPS). She has authored over 80 research papers on online privacy, phishing and semantic attacks, spam, electronic voting, anonymous publishing, usable access control, and other topics. She has played a key role in building the usable privacy and security research community, having co-edited the seminal book Security and Usability (O'Reilly 2005) and founded the Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security (SOUPS). She also chaired the Platform for Privacy Preferences Project (P3P) Specification Working Group at the W3C and authored the book Web Privacy with P3P (O'Reilly 2002). She has served on a number of boards, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation Board of Directors, and on the editorial boards of several journals. In 2003 she was named one of the top 100 innovators 35 or younger by Technology Review magazine. She was previously a researcher at AT&T-Labs Research and taught in the Stern School of Business at New York University.