Chris Sestito

Chris Sestito is co-founder and CEO of HiddenLayer, an Austin, Texas, company that protects machine learning models from attack. A threat researcher by background, he argues that machine learning models need their own security tools.

Founding HiddenLayer With Former Colleagues

Sestito was director of threat research at Cylance and vice president of engineering at Qualys. He co-founded HiddenLayer in 2022 with Tanner Burns and Jim Ballard, colleagues from Qualys, Cylance, and BlackBerry, where Burns was a threat researcher and Ballard a data curation team lead. Its approach watches the inputs going into a model and the predictions coming out, looking for patterns that suggest someone is probing or tampering with it, without needing the customer’s raw training data. He told TechCrunch that adversarial attacks “are not loud like ransomware” and that “you have to be looking for them to catch them in time.”

Protecting Machine Learning Models

Sestito’s case is that companies have spent heavily on machine learning without defending it. Adversarial attacks, he told TechCrunch, can cause “all of the same damage we’ve seen in traditional cyber attacks including exposing customer data and destroying production systems.” As he put it, “With any new technology comes new attack vectors; this is the same fight on a new frontier.”