Senior Security Researcher - Cloud Detection - Remote US

The successful candidate must be a strong leader in the security field with proven technical skills and experience researching, hunting for and responding to advanced threat actors in cloud environments. As a member of a highly trained security research team – The Counter Threat Unit (CTU™) – the person will provide technical leadership for client-focused projects, generate high-confidence threat intelligence and contribute to the development of advanced technologies and processes to detect threat actors and enhance protections for our Managed Security Services clients.  They will also work closely with teammates and our Security and Risk Consulting delivery teams to provide subject matter expertise in support of Cyber-Security Incident Management (such as incident handling, breach management, forensics, electronic discovery, etc.). 

Role Responsibilities

• Development of countermeasures to detect or block threats using cloud technologies:
  • Explore new detection mechanisms
    • Transform new and emerging threat research into actionable detection measures. Leveraging creative countermeasure development techniques and detection tooling.
  • Cloud countermeasures
    • Discover how a threat manifests in a Cloud environment and research how to detect that threat in Cloud telemetry and environment auditing.
  • Network IDS/IPS countermeasures
    • Analyze how a network enabled threat transmits data over the wire and research how to detect or block that threat with Snort or Suricata IDS/IPS rule creation.
• Contribute to the development and delivery of competitive services, methodologies, and deliverables in the security marketplace.
• Serve as a top subject matter expert in cloud technologies
• Work as an internal subject matter expert for other departments, including marketing, product management, and the broader Counter Threat Unit research team.

Required Experience

• Minimum of 5 years of experience with public cloud vendor environments including AWS, Azure, Office 365, and GCP.
• Programming and software prototyping.
  • Proficient in at least one of the following programming languages, Python, Golang, C/C++.
  • Familiarity with CI/CD pipelines, testing and automation.
• Forensic analysis of collected evidence artifacts.
  • Analysis of memory images from common OS types.
  • Analysis of disk images that may involve various file systems (NTFS, FAT, EXT, HFS+…) and operating systems.
• Network traffic analysis.
  • Identifying detectable traits of threat network traffic.
  • Broad analysis of traffic patterns to identify anomalies.
• Event log analysis.
  • Inspection of log data from common operating systems and security infrastructure to identify threat activity and piece together an incident.
  • Analysis of log data from security infrastructure (firewalls, web proxy etc.) to identify anomalous patterns of behavior.
• MS in engineering/computer science and 10 years relevant experience or PhD with 5 years relevant experience.

Preferred Experience

• Performing analysis of security and infrastructure logs using modern data analysis strategies.
• Researching targeted threat groups and their tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTP).
• Experience in developing tools for malicious code analysis, network traffic analysis and the detection of malicious code on endpoint systems is a strong plus.
• Performing vulnerability and exploit research and analysis.
• Strong understanding of computer architecture and operating systems concepts.
• Experience working with version control systems, issue tracking tools, and CI/CD systems.
• Experience with deployment automation tools and techniques, including Packer, Vagrant, Terraform, Ansible, AWS CloudFormation, and Azure Resource Manager.
• Thorough knowledge of information security components, principles, practices, and procedures.
• Thorough understanding of computer network exploitation (CNE) and computer network defense (CND) concepts.
• Ability to articulate and present findings to broader audiences in a clear manner.
• 5% travel may be required.