Defensive Security Operations

After too many years of security operations work, Chris Daywalt tries to turn his phone off at 5:00 pm EST. While there are a bunch of training classes and education somewhere on his resume, much of what he has to teach was learned at the school of hard knocks, often at the expense of his previous clients. He wants to help you spend more time detecting and denying adversaries and less time banging your head against your keyboard. He dips his blueberry donuts in orange juice.

Chris’ 19-year career includes work for organizations of all sizes, both government and private sector, and is distributed roughly like so:

I was born and raised in upstate New York, where I remember helping my elementary school teachers with their computer problems, hacking wifi networks, and even mining bitcoin on high school computers. (Luckily, I didnt get in trouble for that!) In university, I did three semesters of research in privacy in social networks, blockchain-based intrusion detection, and more. The research position required me to gain expertise in networking, cryptography, and social media. More specifically, for the P-Chain project, I created a prototype demonstrating how IoT devices could store and publish transaction history in the form of a blockchain, as well as other types of DAG’s. This implementation was in Python. I actively contributed to open source in college and tutored many peers on topics in cybersecurity and computer science in undergrad.

My curiosity led me to a career in technology, and my background in research and cybersecurity led me to Palo Alto Networks. There, I worked cross functionally with sales, IT, security, marketing, and more! Through that experience, I learned a ton and found that my unique skillset was mainly around communication, product, and engineering. While at Palo Alto Networks, I won 2 hackathons and a capture the flag competition. My work in IT and SOAR automation enabled me to join sales calls as an occasional sales engineer for the XSOAR product. From there, I began freelancing and ultimately ended up cofounding a company called Kayyo, where I actively lead as a CTO for a team of 4.