Leadership in the modern Security Landscape: Insights from Zscaler's Chief Security Officer

Editor's note: The following is an except of an Evanta interview with Zscaler Chief Security Officer, Deepen Desai The complete interview can be found here. 

Chief Security Officer Deepen Desai of Zscaler got somewhat of a unique start to his career in cybersecurity – through gaming with roommates at San Jose State University. At the time, Deepen was working on his master’s degree and planning to be a software engineer. Back in 2002, while his roommates were playing an online video game, he realized that the players online “were cheating or hacking or whatever term you want to use to gain unfair advantage – they could see things that the normal video game would not allow,” he explains.

This made Deepen so curious that he started digging into the Windows operating system that the game used. His curiosity was so great that he ended up writing an AntiCheat program to catch these types of hacking attempts against gaming applications. Deepen shares that he “ended up selling my program to one of the gaming leagues while I was doing my master's degree – and that was my first experience in the field of security.”

Deepen continues that the AntiCheat program experience taught him a lesson he continues to apply to cybersecurity today: “How bad guys use – or should I say ‘abuse’ – the same API calls and the same vectors that are available to the good guys.” He explains that his roles early in his career were tied to vulnerability exploits, creating detections, zero day vulnerability analysis, and reverse engineering. “The goal was to understand what the issues are and how the bad guys are exploiting them, so that we could write defensive features in the product,” he said.

After about five years, Deepen got into his first leadership role, where he was focused on malware and antivirus at the network layer. He adds that he also gained experience in building a product and creating sandboxing. He joined Zscaler in 2014, and currently leads corporate and product security.  

Read what Deepen calls the most important for security leaders today on Evanta's website and join Deepen for his upcoming keynote, How Zero Trust and AI Enable Innovation That Outpaces Adversaries, at the Southern California CISO Executive Summit on December 3 to hear more.

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