Alex Cowan

CEO
RazorSecure

Biography

Alex Cowan founded RazorSecure in 2015 following a career in the gaming industry where he worked for over ten years to prevent attackers against systems in a 24/7 environment. Alex founded RazorSecure looking to address a critical flaw that he saw with many existing solutions; they raised too many false positives and became ineffective over time.

For the past five years, Alex has worked to bring this solution into the rail market. Through collaboration with rail operators, train builders and system suppliers, RazorSecure now protects hundreds of trains across the UK, Europe and North America.

Presentation

Beyond the Mirror: Achieving Total Onboard Visibility
To achieve true visibility, monitoring cannot simply be performed at 1 or 2 network locations. In this session, Alex Cowan (CEO, RazorSecure) discusses a holistic strategy for monitoring “everything, everywhere”—from Ethernet, CAN, and MVB to the host systems themselves. Alex will explore how to move beyond the limitations of physical mirror ports by performing network monitoring directly on the switch, incorporating monitoring of serial buses, while simultaneously implementing Host-based IDS (HIDS) to detect internal process anomalies. This approach not only achieves better visibility and detection of threats, it’s also cost effective and easy to integrate through leveraging existing on-board hardware devices.