From the onset of his career, Ryan Warns has been focused on solving the hard problems in cybersecurity. He started his career working for the DoD as a technical content editor for an internal publication where he was exposed to the breadth of cybersecurity problems and job functions across the industry. From there, he spent the majority of his early career focusing on reverse engineering, vulnerability analysis, and offensive capability development for Windows and Android.
After leaving the public sector, Ryan moved to the commercial cybersecurity space where he continued to work in different capacities as a technical leader and subject matter expert in reverse engineering, malware and vulnerability analysis, and Red Team spaces. During this time Ryan helped found a team focused on creating innovative cybersecurity solutions for situations where existing technology was insufficient, or where there were shortcomings in how the industry was currently addressing a problem. Many of these projects were focused on operationalizing threat intelligence by designing custom solutions, tooling, and analysis.
Ryan has presented independent research at CanSecWest, Infiltrate, COUNTERMEASURE, and Hack In The Box.
Ryan also has a passion for technical training and has served as a content lead, lead instructor, and technical director for multiple cybersecurity training programs. In addition to internal and customer training, he has designed and instructed training at Black Hat USA.
MORE ABOUT RYAN
At Outcome Security, Ryan focuses on the leading backend architecture and integration of cybersecurity data into our solutions and helps develop Outcome Security’s marketing strategy.
WHAT PROBLEM(S) ARE YOU HOPING TO SOLVE BY CREATING KALEIDOSCOPE?
While I was pretty specialized in low-level engineering I’ve contributed to projects and worked with professionals across a lot of cybersecurity disciplines. What becomes pretty apparent in this industry is that there are so many ways to cultivate your technical skills and break in, and there are so many different things to specialize in, that it can be difficult to get people speaking the same language.
As I got into Threat Intelligence the knock-on effect of this was pretty clear – there are a lot of products claiming to solve a lot of problems and while there’s a spectrum for how effective they are, there’s so much obfuscation between “data/tool claiming to solve a problem” and “problems my organization needs to solve” that it can be extremely difficult to figure out which solutions are worth buying. Is the data good? Does my team/organization need this data? Are the software people cyber people that understand my problems? And so on.
With Kaleidoscope, we’re hoping to solve both of these problems by building a solution and framework to make sharing technical information easier and more efficient, and in doing so create something to move the needle on figuring out how cybersecurity data should be structured and used.
WHAT ARE YOUR TOP 3 FAVORITE PODCASTS OR BOOKS?
- One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
- The Dark Tower series by Stephen King
- Not Another D&D Podcast by Headgum
WHAT DO YOU ENJOY DOING WHEN YOU ARE NOT WORKING?
It’s a bit of a meme to say I’m An AvID gAmEr but that’s been a pretty consistent hobby since I was younger, sometimes pretty seriously. Before going into cybersecurity I wanted to be a game developer, and I met my wife playing Counter-Strike. Beyond that, I’ve always enjoyed reading and writing fiction, plus all of the cliché answers like hiking, going to the gym, etc.
