Oege de Moor

Oege de Moor is founder and CEO of XBOW, an AI penetration testing company that lists Seattle, Washington, as its headquarters and runs as a remote team. He founded it in January 2024. De Moor lives in Malta, GeekWire reported.

Oxford, Semmle, and Copilot

De Moor was a professor of computer science at the University of Oxford. He founded Semmle, which found security flaws in source code and became GitHub Advanced Security after GitHub bought it. At GitHub he founded GitHub Next and started the Copilot project. “I wrote a memo in December of 2020 where I sketched what would later become Copilot,” he said on Sequoia's Training Data podcast.

He said the moment he saw what code models could do came when he gave one the interview questions he used to ask at Oxford. With one attempt it failed, but with a hundred or a thousand attempts it solved most of them.

Automating the exploit

At Semmle, an offensive security team used the product to find flaws, and researchers then wrote exploits by hand. “Even at that time, it was kind of embarrassing to me that that last step of finding the exploits was done manually,” de Moor said. XBOW automates that step. Nico Waisman, a former Semmle researcher, joined him to build it. De Moor has said AI's tendency to invent things can help here. “In offensive security, hallucination can be a feature!” he told SecurityWeek.