TLDR;

My name is Kyle and I work in the matrix. I am an offensive security professional that specializes in penetration testing, adversary emulation, and Open-Source Intelligence (OSINT). Organizations leverage my skills to mitigate risk by employing me to perform a variety of technical security assessments. These assessments can be either be nuanced or broad in scope, all dependent upon the organization’s business needs. In my spare time you’ll find me reading, hunting, fishing, or watching sports.

📖 🦃 🎣 🏈 🏁

Long Version

I work with a team of highly-skilled professionals to perform security audits in the form of penetration tests with the ultimate goal of reducing risk by finding security vulnerabilities before others do. My role offers me the opportunity to drive security initiatives that directly impact business systems and incident response procedures across organizations.

The typical day as a penetration tester varies a lot. My day could involve any combination of the following:

• Conducting penetration testing assessments in the areas of:
  • Cloud Infrastructure & Projects
  • Modern Web Applications & Services
  • Enterprise Networks
  • Hardware & Wireless technologies
• Writing detailed technical reports that outline findings for leadership and stakeholders.
• Drive technical readouts and remediation discussions across teams.
• Create programming scripts (mainly Python) and leverage AI (LLMs) to improve and automate processes
• Evaluated security control efficacy by emulating the latest adversarial behaviors.
• Created agnostic detection rules to improve detection capabilities (SIGMA rules mainly).
• Modified detections throughout various tools to ensure rule validation.
• Documenting standard operating procedures.

Previously…

I used to work as a cybersecurity specialist and range trainer for an Israeli cybersecurity startup. I spent my day educating security professionals such as SOC analysts, cybersecurity analysts, incident responders, and threat hunters. I would coach them through **simulated incidents (such as ransomware infections) that deployed malware onto simulated virtual corporate networks. The live incidents were focused around defensive (blue team) and offensive (red team) operations. Topics that I taught would include networking, cryptography, forensics, intrusion detection, endpoint forensics, web application hacking, and much more. During training scenarios I would leverage my knowledge to help teams navigate enterprise tools such as Splunk, Palo Alto, Carbon Black EDR, and other open-source tools such as OWASP Zap and Autopsy.

Prior to my career in cybersecurity, I worked as a financial advisor with a Fortune 500 financial services company. As a CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER™ professional, I acted as a fiduciary that identified investment strategies for clients that best fit their goals. I always joke that I truly got my start in security in this role because the essence of the job required me to social engineer families and persuade them to change their investment behaviors.