Defend and Protect

Benjamin Harris' start-up watchTowr aims to make cybersecurity more effective and accessible for everyone's safety.

- KAREN TEE

An original poster of Hackers, the 1995 movie about a scrappy group of teenage cyberpunks hangs prominently in Benjamin Harris’ apartment. It is not surprising that the 28-year-old CEO of watchTowr, an Attack Surface Management platform, identifies with it.

In the same way as the young main characters, he also became fascinated with technology and security systems at a young age, learning about application codes and how they worked on his own. At 17, Harris was asked to leave school. “It wasn’t really a friendly conversation. My father put it best when he said education was not really for me,” he deadpans.

Similar to the movie, where the protagonists eventually defeat the bad guy’s nefarious plan to unleash a dangerous virus, Harris is focused on protecting organisations against cyberattacks.

Two weeks after leaving school with just two GCSE O Levels, he secured a job at Portcullis Computer Security, which was later acquired by Cisco. Since then, the computer wunderkind has been consistently involved in building and leading high-performing offensive cybersecurity teams across the globe.