This is the post I should have written months ago, actually back in November last year, when I joined the Foundstone practice (part of McAfee Strategic Security Services) as Principal Architect for EMEA.
But time has been scarce, with lots of new developments and challenges both in my personal and professional life, including spending a month in New York (thanks to the Foundstone crew in Manhattan for their hospitality!), teaching Malware Analysis along with Christiaan Beek, Melissa Augustine and the rest of the Foundstone EMEA team in BlackHat Abu Dhabi and catching ‘chombies’ and other malware on various Incident Response engagements across Europe.
I feel really proud to be part of a team with such a strong pedigree and that has built a reputation as enterprise network security experts though the publication of numerous books and articles for the benefit of the security community since 1999 (i.e. Hacking Exposed, HACME series, forensics tools, etc…). I will list some of the URLs/Twitter accounts you want to keep an eye on at the end of this post.
As things come back to normality (if that ever existed) I hope I will be able to take more time to share some of the stuff that I come across at work, the projects and research that I’m working on and some other random IT Security ideas.
Why of this change? I guess it all comes down to the fact that I wanted to be back on the trenches and this was a great opportunity for doing so. After 6 years focusing on establishing and leading the IT Security program for a large company while going through multiple acquisitions, I found myself ‘stepping up the management ladder’, something I wasn’t sure I wanted to do at this point. Talking along these lines, I feel identified with this post from Mark Curphey, founder of OWASP, and now part of the Foundstone Services team too. In summary, although working for iSOFT has been one of the greatest experiences in my life, I thought it was time for me to move on and find out what the future at McAfee holds for me.
I can’t finish this post though without a big THANK YOU to all my colleagues that worked with me in iSOFT for their hard work, their passion and their commitment to the security program we built together over the years. I am genuinely grateful and proud for the opportunity I’ve had to work with and learn from such a world-class team. All the best!
- Foundstone Free Tools: http://www.mcafee.com/us/downloads/free-tools/index.aspx
- Foundstone Whitepapers: http://www.mcafee.com/apps/view-all/publications.aspx?tf=foundstone&sz=10
- Open Research Security Blog: http://blog.opensecurityresearch.com/
- Hacking Exposed Series: http://www.mcafee.com/us/campaigns/hacking_exposed/index.html
- Twitter: @Foundstone / @FSEMEA