Alexander Antukh
CISO of Glovo
Alexander Antukh is the current Director of Security of Glovo, where he has led their security mission over the past year. A passionate security expert for over a decade, he is always looking towards original challenges and opportunities to expand his security knowledge.
His primary responsibility as a Director is the protection of global assets, developing and implementing the company security strategy against known security threats and vulnerabilities.
“My first steps (upon joining) were risk assessment and then the executive session to understand what key areas of focus were for risk planning,” he added.
In Antukh’s mind, his security mission “is not to save the world, but to identify, measure and present relevant security risks to businesses, and to propose effective measures to reduce them to an acceptable level.”
It’s all about having an impact, as he states: “One of the things I was really passionate about throughout my career, and especially recently, is about how we're able to measure security, how we're able to demonstrate the impact. So once you start to work on the executive level, you need to communicate to the stakeholders who need to make the decision about the investments.”
One of the areas Antukh tackles at Glovo is the security governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) and how to quantify the risk. As he explains, “part of my personal interest is what's called ‘probabilistic thinking’. It’s not just yes or no. There is always some probability, so we're practising and training internally on how to be better at that.
Antukh says that the fascinating thing about this type of thinking is that it's a skill everybody could master. He cites examples such as betting companies and the probability a team might win. It can be applied to anything, he maintains. “So once we are trained enough, we’re applying that to cybersecurity. It's aligned with our core mission of security about driving efficient cyber risk management.
It is through reading that gives Antukh a different point of view and helps him with his approach in his work. “I like to read the classics of philosophy and see how it applies to pretty much everything we have in the modern world and society. It helps me plan this strategy. Once we start to question why we do what we do, if we have a good answer to that, then everything else starts to become relatively easy. I think we know a lot about the what and how, but sometimes we lack the why.”
Antukh values the commitment Glovo has to contribute and make a social impact. He has an inherent desire to be part of that mission.
His achievements at Glovo include moving all of their accounts under second factor authentication and establishing the security service desk, from which they have served over a thousand requests. But to Antukh, it’s his team that he is most proud of, stating that “we are a diverse team of 13 different nationalities, and we sometimes have quite different points of view and opinions. It helps us to solve the problems and to advance with our security strategy.”
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