Pat Talcott began his career in the tech industry performing freelance web design and development work for small businesses and state and local government. As cyber actors and attacks began to gain mainstream media attention though, he knew immediately he wanted to know everything possible about the attackers perpetrating these attacks. Pivoting into cyber security, he began competing in hacking CTFs alongside Ryan Warns and began working professionally as a malware reverse engineer specializing in Windows and Android malware. Pat went on to employ his expertise in a variety of diverse roles over 9 years in the intelligence community.
Pat brought his reverse engineering experience into the DoD as part of a team working to employ reverse engineering of desktop and mobile malware in order to design, develop and operationalize CNO systems for tactical access. This work required maintaining awareness of open source vulnerabilities and exploits, developing initial access vectors and endpoint identification systems, and integrating them with operational systems and databases for processing. After spending 4 years performing this targeted R&D he sought to apply his experience more directly and began working as an analyst guiding and leading network operations. For the next 5 years, he worked tirelessly to track and understand the tools, techniques, and tactics of cyber actors and developed a variety of analytics and analytical techniques to enhance and maintain this understanding. Throughout this time he worked as part of the Kaizen CTF team to develop and perform operational training for commercial and government clients through practical exercises covering the full spectrum of skills employed by red teamers and penetration testers. Pat joined the commercial sector to utilize his experience as part of a team to create custom tools and techniques informed by cyber threat intelligence and performed analysis to this effect.
MORE ABOUT PAT
At Outcome Security, Pat utilizes his subject matter expertise to inform the design of our tools and processes to maximize their practical use and application with seamless familiarity and develop our internal culture and processes to suit the needs of our top talent.
What made you want to develop Kaleidoscope?
I spent most of my career working with a vast array of tools and different siloed processes and teams. Consistently every team had the same problem in aligning priorities with others and delivering our product in an effective way to our counterparts working on other aspects of the mission. I wasted hours going through reporting and cross-querying for information and became obsessive about tracking this information in a shared space with my immediate peers, but was never able to employ a workflow that was effective at providing coordination even internally, much less across separate organizations.
What are your top 3 favorite podcasts or books?
- House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski
- Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig
- Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson
What do you enjoy doing when you are not working?
I’m an insatiable workaholic but when I’m rarely not working I’m usually camping or hiking with my wife and dog, or indulging my creative interests by playing guitar, or drawing, 3d modeling, or dabbling in game development.
