A monthly recurring feature highlighting the people who truly make the Talos difference.
Ryan Pentney reflects on 10 years of Talos and his many roles from the Sourcefire days
Pentney and his team are threat hunters and researchers who contribute to Talos’ research and reports shared with government and private sector partners.
James Nutland studies what makes threat actors tick, growing our understanding of the current APT landscape
Nutland says he goes into every engagement or new project with a completely open mind and a blank slate — using his background investigating terror operations to find out as much as he can about a particular adversary’s operation.
Heather Couk is here to keep your spirits up during a cyber emergency, even if it takes the “Rocky” music
. The bulk of her career was with a manufacturing company working as a security and email administrator, but she uses her criminal justice degree daily now with Talos IR helping to track down bad actors or helping customers understand adversaries’ motivation and tactics.
How looking at decades of spam led Jaeson Schultz from Y2K to the metaverse and cryptocurrency
“I’m completely interested in the creative ways computers can break down,” Schultz jokes.
You can try to hide your firmware from Kelly Patterson, but she’ll find it (and break it)
Patterson and her teammates are responsible for helping to disclose and patch more than 200 security vulnerabilities a year, some of which affect devices used in thousands of households around the world.
Gergana Karadzhova-Dangela wants to send the ladder back down to the next generation of incident responders
Karadzhova-Dangela's family put her on a plane to Massachusetts without a return ticket and it wasn't until the IT job gave her enough disposable income to afford plane tickets back and forth to Bulgaria that she could see her family.
How Joe Marshall helps defend everything from electrical grids to grain co-ops across multiple continents
Marshall is a senior security strategist for Talos’ Strategic Communications team, specifically focusing on industrial control systems.
Researcher Spotlight: Jacob Finn creates his own public-private partnership at Talos
Today, Finn combs through Talos’ various intelligence sources, open-source research, partner resources, and Cisco product telemetry to track major attacker trends and emerging threats.
Researcher Spotlight: Giannis Tziakouris first learned how to fix his family’s PC, and now he’s fixing networks all over the globe
As a senior incident responder, Giannis helps Cisco Talos Incident Response customers secure and respond to security incidents across the world.
Researcher Spotlight: How David Liebenberg went from never having opened Terminal to hunting international APTs
When Dave Liebenberg started his first day at Talos, he had never even opened Terminal on a Mac before — let alone written a Snort rule or infiltrated a dark web forum.
Researcher Spotlight: How Azim Khodjibaev went from hunting real-world threats to threats on the dark web
Most of the time, Khodjibaev is combing through various dark web forums, ransomware group chats, Russian-speaking websites and other sources trying to learn of attackers’ next moves.
Researcher Spotlight: Globetrotting with Yuri Kramarz
“You have completely different angles in preparing different customers for defense during major global events depending on their role, technology and function,” Kramarz said.
Researcher Spotlight: How Asheer Malhotra looks for ‘instant gratification’ in threat hunting
The India native has transitioned from a reverse-engineer hobbyist to a public speaker in just a few years.
Researcher Spotlight: You should have been listening to Lurene Grenier years ago
The exploit researcher recently rejoined Talos after starting her career with the company’s predecessor Lurene Grenier says state-sponsored threat actors keep her up at night, even after years of studying and following them. She’s spent her security career warning people why th
Researcher Spotlight: Around the security world and back again with Nick Biasini
Nick Biasini’s seen it all. Going on a nearly 20-year security career, he’s been a part of some of Cisco Talos’ largest undertakings in the company’s history. From an attack on the global Olympic Games, to a wireless router malware that affected hundreds of thousands of devices
Researcher Spotlight: Martin Lee, EMEAR lead, Talos Strategic Communications
Who knew you could connect Moses to threat intelligence? When the security community usually thinks about the origins of cybersecurity and threat intelligence, the conversation may quickly center around the codebreakers in World War II or the Creeper software developed in the 19