Cybercrime Magazine caught up with Dr. Taher Elgamal, Partner at Evolution Equity Partners, at the recent RSA Conference 2025 in San Francisco. The tech industry luminary was the recipient of the lifetime achievement award from the RSA conference in 2009.
Elgamal, an internationally respected information security leader and cryptographer, told us that “the biggest (cyber) threat is attacking the AI (artificial intelligence) stack,” and that the AI stack is not very well known. But, bad actors are usually ahead of the game and they know how to attack it.
Evolution is steeped in the AI space, says Elgamal, and it was recently announced that one of their portfolio companies, Protect AI, was being acquired by Palo Alto Networks for an undisclosed sum – which some media outlets have estimated to be north of $500 million.
Prior to joining Evolution Elgamal served as CTO, Security at Salesforce.com for 10 years. Widely known as the “father of SSL, the Internet security standard Secure Sockets Layer, he holds several patents in online security, payments and data compression and founded numerous companies. Earlier in his career Elgamal was Director of Engineering at RSA Security and Chief Scientist at Netscape.