Giovanni Vigna is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of California in Santa Barbara, and the director of the NSF AI Institute for Agent-based Cyber Threat Intelligence and Operation (ACTION) at UCSB. He was the CTO and co-founder of Lastline, Inc., a company that provides anti-malware solutions. Lastline was acquired by VMware, Inc., in June 2020 and since then Dr. Vigna has served in a part-time role as the Sr. Director of Threat Intelligence at VMware.

His research interests include malware analysis, vulnerability assessment, the underground economy, the security of social networks, voting security and misinformation detection, and the applications of machine learning and artificial intelligence to security problems.

Giovanni has been the Program Chair of the International Symposium on Recent Advances in Intrusion Detection (RAID 2003), of the ISOC Symposium on Network and Distributed Systems Security (NDSS 2009), of the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (Oakland 2010-2011), and of the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS 2020-2021).

He is known for organizing and running, since 2003, a yearly educational Capture The Flag hacking contest, called iCTF, that every year involves dozens of teams around the world.

Giovanni is also the founder of the Shellphish hacking group, who has participated in more DEF CON CTF competitions than any other group in history. He received his Ph.D. from Politecnico di Milano, Italy, and he is an IEEE Fellow and an ACM Fellow.