New Position in Cyber Security at Percipient Networks

After working for The MITRE Corporation for a bit over four years, I left a few weeks ago to begin work at a cyber security start-up: Percipient Networks. Currently our main product is STRONGARM: an intelligent DNS blackhole. Usually DNS blackholes are set-up to block known bad domains by sending requests for those domains to a non-routable or localhost. STRONGARM redirects that traffic for identification and analysis. You could give it a try and let us know of any feedback you might have! Much of my involvement has been in the design and creation of the blackhole, including writing protocol parsers for both standard protocols and malware.

So far, I’ve been greatly enjoying my new position. There’s been a renewed focus on technical work, while being in a position to greatly influence both STRONGARM and Percipient Networks. My average day involves many more activities now, including technical work: reverse engineering, reviewing/writing code, or reading RFCs; as well as other work: mentoring [1], user support, writing documentation, and putting desks together [2]. I’ve been thoroughly enjoying the varied activities!

Shifting software stacks has also been nice. I’m now writing mostly Python code, instead of mostly MATLAB, Java and C/C++ [3]. It has been great how many ready to use packages are available for Python! I’ve been very impressed with the ecosystem, and been encouraged to feed back into the open-source community, where appropriate.