Manos Athanatos

Quick facts

• Previously:  ENISA’s AHWG on SOCs
• Currently: ICS-FORTH, TUC
• Expertise: Systems Security, Cyber Security, Automation, Playbooks, SOC & incident response, incident management, EU-Funding expert, Technical and Product manager
• Other Professional Affiliations: Voting member of OASIS CACAO TC, member of Automation SIG of FIRST.org, management board member of ECSI cluster
• Education: B.S. and M.Sc. in Computer Science, University of Crete

Professional journey

After completing my B.S. and during my M.Sc. in Computer Science at the University of Crete, I began working at FORTH-ICS, and that’s where my journey in the cybersecurity field started.

Over the past 20 years, I’ve been lucky enough to work on a wide range of R&D projects, participating in over 50 initiatives that spanned everything from network security to deception technologies and cybersecurity automation. I’ve been in different roles – Coordinator, Scientific and Technical Team Lead, Risk and Quality Assurance Manager, Evaluator – each of them shaping my understanding of how security technologies need to not only work in theory but in practice, and most importantly, the necessity for collaboration in the field.

One of the things that I’ve always found most rewarding is working in roles that bridge research and development, whether that’s leading teams or coordinating technical and scientific efforts across different projects.

Currently, I’m actively contributing to industry standards as a member of the OASIS CACAO TC, as well as TLP from FIRST.org and Automation SIG and ENISA’s AHWG on SOCs.

The path forward at Cymph

Through my involvement with OASIS CACAO and discussions with Cymph’s co-founders, we identified a critical gap in cybersecurity: the lack of standardised, interoperable, mature playbooks for response coordination and cross-team collaboration. With my experience in both R&D and product development, I’m excited to help build a platform that enables teams to collaborate more effectively and respond faster to threats. The real challenge is making sure that innovation leads to tangible solutions, and that’s exactly what Cymph is doing.