Kristian Kostecky is Chief Technology Officer of VM Farms / Stack.io and is responsible for the company's technology and security. He has built production infrastructure since 1995, and securing it has always been part of the work.
At VM Farms he oversees platform and network architecture, the security programme that protects every customer environment, and the SOC 2 Type I and Type II audits behind it. He built the company's engineering and operations team, hiring more than thirty people.
Before VM Farms he spent eleven years at Hostopia, building networks and server clusters in data centres in Toronto and Miami and running an email platform for more than four million users, including its intrusion detection, abuse filtering and DDoS mitigation.
His current research applies AI models and autonomous agents to vulnerability response: assessing new disclosures against live infrastructure as they are published, determining whether a flaw is actually exploitable, and containing it before a vendor patch is available.
Security programme
- Detection. External attack-surface and dependency vulnerability scanning matched against the CISA Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalogue, host intrusion detection and forensics, and behavioural monitoring.
- Mitigation. Web application firewalls with custom rules, collaborative threat-intelligence blocking, least-privilege containment and DDoS protection.
- Access. Zero-trust certificate-based access, VPN-only administration and default-deny firewalls.
- Compliance. SOC 2 Type I and Type II; PCI DSS controls for customer environments.
Career
- 2011 – presentCTO, VM Farms / Stack.io. Technology and security leadership for a managed-hosting provider that owns its hardware.
- 2000 – 2011Lead Architect, Email Systems, Hostopia. Email infrastructure for more than four million users, and the data-centre networks and clusters behind it.
- 1998 – 2000Systems Administrator, Computrust. Unix systems administration for a hosting provider later acquired by Hostopia.
- 1995 – 1998Partner & Senior Programmer, New Renaissance. Co-founded a web development firm.
BSc, Physics and Astronomy, York University.