Erik Pistelli is an experienced software architect, security expert and reverse engineer as well as entrepreneur who believes in lifelong learning. Having been in the security industry for more than 10 years, he founded Cerbero Labs with the vision to create the perfect multi-tool for low-level professionals.
Read our exclusive interview with Erik Pistelli, the CEO and founder of Cerbero Labs about his inspiring journey and beliefs.
1. What led to the formation of Cerbero Labs? What is the history behind the name of the company?
In Greek mythology Cerberus is a three-headed dog that guards the gates of the underworld to prevent the dead from leaving. Since “Cerberus” is often used as a product name, I opted for the Italian “Cerbero”. It was original and sounded more melodic. The idea behind the name was that our solutions would guard the system from malware.
Our first company was named Cerbero GmbH, but when we created a newer company we changed the name to Cerbero Labs as it better represented the nature of our work, which is technical.
2. How do you come up with the idea of a logo for Cerbero labs?
That took a while. The logo was created when our product became what it is today: a multi-tool for low level professionals like malware analysts, reverse engineers, forensic experts, hackers, etc.
I’m personally a fan of Swiss army knives and the logo is designed to immediately convey to users both the amount of features present in our solution and the quality of it. Swiss army knives are high quality multi-tools and we want to offer the same type of experience to our customers.
3. Explain the need and benefits of Cerbero Suite? How does Cerbero Suite help organizations with its solutions?
Cerbero Suite not only offers many different type of tools, but all the tools it offers are integrated with each other. This gives a unique experience to the user, which can’t be matched by using separate tools.
Moreover, certain analysis tools in Cerbero Suite are state-of-the-art, so they offer the best type of analysis available.
Having all this integrated technology gives us the possibility to offer unparalleled functionality also in terms of our SDK.
Cerbero Suite can be employed by many type of professionals for different purposes. For instance, many of our customers use it as their go-to tool for malware triage. Other customers use it for custom data analysis or reverse engineering.
4. What drives the innovation and improvement in Cerbero Suite?
Our goal is not only to offer the best technology available to our customers, but to create technology that transmits a “wow” effect. Since our product line is directed to a highly technical audience, it is extremely challenging to amaze that audience. That challenge is what drives our innovation and improvement.
5. What has been the journey like for Cerbero Labs since its formation in 2010?
When Cerbero GmbH was founded in 2010 it wasn’t selling products. We were selling services. After a few years we started to sell a product called “Cerbero Profiler”, which was a distant ancestor of our current Cerbero Suite product. Cerbero Profiler originally was a simple UI meant to analyze certain files like PDFs.
However, we released Cerbero Suite only a few years ago in 2019, when we stopped our service activity and switched to full-time product development.
Cerbero Suite is a completely new concept: while it offers file analysis capabilities, it is not limited to it. It includes disassemblers, decompilers, emulators, hex editor, a native UI for Ghidra, memory analysis and much more.
6. What has been your biggest challenge in your journey as the CEO and founder of Cerbero Labs ? What have you learnt from it?
Initially, the biggest challenge was to figure out for myself the type of product I was working on. Once I learned to create a vision for myself, the next challenge became to communicate that vision to prospective customers.
7. What is your plan in taking Cerbero Labs forward?
We have many plans.
This year we released Cerbero Engine, a solution deeply integrated in our product line. Cerbero Engine is an enterprise solution which offers the same SDK of Cerbero Suite, but designed for cloud applications. While prototype development can be performed using Cerbero Suite, the same code can then run as cloud application using Cerbero Engine.
Very recently we have released our package technology, which makes the installation of plugins for Cerbero Suite (and Cerbero Engine) a simple operation which can be performed with a few clicks.
We intend to further elaborate on our package technology and we’ll release a major update related to it soon. We’re also currently working on multi-processing capabilities which will be also exposed to our SDK. We’re also in the process of documenting our whole SDK. This will facilitate external plugin developers to create complex tools.
Over the course of the 2022 we’ll release a few commercial packages. These packages will only be available to commercial licenses.
E-SPIN has been actively promoting Cerbero Labs full range of products of file inspections. The Cerbero Suite came in standard and advances edition where the advances edition are suitable for expert in forensic and security field. E-SPIN is active in consulting, supplying, training and maintaining Cerbero products for the enterprise, government and military customers (or distribute and resell as part of the complete package) on the region E-SPIN do businesses.
Please feel free to contact E-SPIN for your inquiry and requirement, so we can assist you on the exact requirement in the packaged solutions that you may required for your operation or project needs.
Related Post you may interest
File malware analysis, forensics, reversing with Cerbero Seminar
