I am a Senior Security Analyst working in Forensic Analysis and Remediation for Wordfence / Defiant Inc. I am experienced at working in live, production environments in areas such as Release and Configuration Management for major financial organisations. I am a former Analyst for JPMorgan where I worked as Software Developer, Linux/UNIX Systems Administrator, Sybase Database Administrator and also managed a global team of Analysts on the Swaps Derivatives Trading platform. I spent 5 years working for JPMorgan based in the City of London, as well as a further 2 years as a Senior Analyst at NYSE in Canary Wharf, London, UK, before moving back to the North East of England. Much of what I worked on at this time would be considered as DevOps these days – acting at the junction between developers, systems administrators and project management.
When back in the North East, I gained experience of setting up a Managed IT Services company with my then business partner. The idea was to offer services like hosted email and offsite backup to small and medium sized business in the region, which was a bit of a departure from what I had done to date. I did get the opportunity to get more hands-on experience with hardware, setting up servers and blades in datacentres. I was also able to get more DevOps experience, working with Amazon AWS systems and Virtualization technology (vmWare etc). I worked on some interesting projects during this time, including working with a local AIM-listed Durham University spin-off. This was a big-data, High Throughput Computing project, using AWS spin up several hundred Linux instances running GAMOS and Condor, to carry out particle physics simulations.
When the likes of Microsoft and Google started to improve their offerings in the areas of email and data storage, it felt like there was little point in trying to compete with them, so the company ended up carrying out mostly general IT support. The business is still going strong, but I missed working on the more technical problems, so I left them to it after a few years and joined Defiant Inc, working in the Site Security Team (SST), where I am now.
The main product we work on at Defiant is the WordPress security plugin, Wordfence. It’s the most popular WordPress security plugin and is installed on over 3 million websites. I am the co-lead for the team, which is spread out across the globe. Customers come to us when their websites have been hacked. We analyse their site for forensic evidence and remove the malware from the site files and database. We use the malware we find to generate signatures for the Web Application Firewall. As well as removing the malware, we also work out what the intrusion vector was for the compromise and provide the customers with a detailed report on keeping them secure. We also publish regular research and work with developers to fix vulnerabilities in WordPress components.