Melih first became a leader in the cybersecurity space in 1998, when he founded Comodo Group. Comodo Group grew quickly to become the largest supplier of SSL certificates in the world, and a major player in the consumer antivirus, website security, and enterprise endpoint protection spaces.
But Melih recognized that one company does not have the power to make the internet a safer place on its own. To truly create a secure online environment that all people could enjoy and benefit from, Melih realized it would be necessary for companies to reach across the aisle and collaborate. So, in 2005, Melih founded the Certification Authority Browser Forum (CA/B Forum), a consortium of certificate authorities, internet browser developers, and OS vendors, with the mission of advancing best practices across the certificate authority industry to ensure secure communications.
Today, the CA/B Forum consists of over forty certificate authority members and six major browser vendors, and acts as a regulating body of the certificate authority space. The Forum issues industry standards and requirements and ensures responsibility among the various certificate authorities and browsers.
In 2009, Melih recognized an emerging problem with “scareware” and illegitimate antivirus software preying on consumers. In response, he initiated the Common Computing Security Standards Forum (CCSS Forum) an organization of vendors of security software, operating systems, and browsers, working to mitigate the risk of malware and protect consumers worldwide. The CCSS Forum maintains an official “whitelist” of trusted antivirus providers, that consumers can use to make sure the antivirus they’re downloading is legitimate.