From math-loving student to Microsoft security engineer and big boss

Mr Nguyen Duy Lan

Lan showed passion for math at high school and received encouragement from his teacher.

Lan said he chose cryptography for his doctoral thesis because the career has close relations with math. He decided to devote himself to information security because the career demands deep knowledge in math, together with logic and sensitivity to discover vulnerabilities in systems. 

After receiving the doctorate, he followed post-doc study, developing a project on building a security system for online identification data in health at CSIRO (Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation)

Lan joined the Microsoft staff in its golden days. At first, he became a member of the firm’s startup project. As the project was later canceled, he found another position at Microsoft Research after attending international recruitment campaigns.

During his time at Microsoft, he was a member of the Cryptography Team and took part in the development of software used in Microsoft’s over 20 major products for millions of users, including the data security tool for the famous search engine Bing.

After eight years of working for Microsoft, Lan and other colleagues at Microsoft established Veramine which includes one American, two Polish and two Vietnamese. 

They were all major security experts in teams which patched flaws and updated Microsoft’s most important products such as Windows, Office, Azure and Xbox.

After two years of development, V-SOC of Veramine got many clients from the US, Singapore, Vietnam, and Australia. Its clients include big names such as the US Air Forces, US Department of Homeland Security and Singaporean Ministry of Defense.

V-SOC is similar to a surveillance camera system which collects data from computer systems in real time. 

The data is analyzed and investigated to give warnings with algorithms and machine learning, and then it gives commands to clients and devices to handle and control network attacks or malicious codes in the system.

According to Lan, Veramine is still focusing on developing products. In the future, Veramine will pay higher attention to sales, but developing products will always be its priority task, he said.