CyberWire Daily - Derek Manky: Putting the rubber to the road. [Threat Intelligence] [Career Notes]

Episode Date: March 20, 2022

Chief Security Strategist and VP of Global Threat Intelligence at FortiGuard Labs, Derek Manky, shares his story from programmer to cybersecurity and how it all came together. Derek started his career teaching programming because he had such a passion for it. When he joined Fortinet, Derek said putting where it "really started putting the rubber to the road and connecting my previous experience with programming and debugging and knowledge of operating systems and all that with real-world applications." Derek advises that it doesn't need to be complicated getting into the cybersecurity field and that there are many avenues to enter the field. He hopes to have made a real dent, or "hopefully a crater" in cyber crime when he ends his career. We thank Derek for sharing his story with us.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're listening to the Cyber Wire Network, powered by N2K. and VPNs, yet breaches continue to rise by an 18% year-over-year increase in ransomware attacks and a $75 million record payout in 2024. These traditional security tools expand your attack surface with public-facing IPs that are exploited by bad actors more easily than ever with AI tools. It's time to rethink your security. Thank you. Learn more at zscaler.com slash security. Hello, my name is Derek Manke, and I am the Chief Security Strategist and VP of Global Threat Intelligence at FortiGuard Labs. When I started, cybercrime was not known to many people now you know when people ask what i do and i say oh i'm in cyber security there's a lot of interest actually which is a good sign if you talk about cyber security people think it's highly technical and some aspects are of course but they just don't know where to start

my father bought me a 286 system when I was about seven years old, and I was the only kid on the block with a computer at the time. And I loved it. So I knew I always wanted to do something in tech. I didn't know security at that point. But I did have this dream in high school of becoming mission control for NASA. Working with mission-critical systems in order to work in high-stress environments, I guess, to have a big impact. Post-secondary, I got into, of course, computer science and

system technology and did a lot of coding. I love programming, and so that was my 24-hour routine, it seems, right? A lot of low-level languages, working not only with C and C++, but Assembler and x86 code. And that got me into more debugging and then reverse engineering, which inherently, again, I wasn't thinking of a security track at the time. But just being really passionate and interested about that, naturally, it got me interested in malware and and computer viruses as well how they work i had a lot of passion around programming so i became a teacher for a while not many people know that about me but i was teaching programming and object oriented programming for a while and then i actually got a a phone call from a friend who was hired at Fortinet and suggested that I apply. And that's how I started my journey here. This was over 18 years ago.

I applied into Fortinet and I got hired actually as a software engineer working on our flagship operating system at the time. And shortly after that, there was some opportunity to work with our FortiGuard Labs team, which again existed all the way back still in 2004. And that's where I really started putting the rubber to the road and connecting my previous experience with programming and debugging and knowledge of operating systems and all that with real world applications that we were already doing in the labs back then. Some of my first projects I worked on were actually with our antivirus engine, writing new code detection routines to catch the latest and greatest malware at the time. We're always up at night. That's what keeps us busy today. It's vastly different compared to, you know, when I started in FortiGuard Labs, we had only a handful of researchers and analysts. We were working graveyard shifts because that's all that was needed back then.

If you looked at the threat landscape, it wasn't incredibly complex like it is today. Fast forward to today, of course, it's a completely different beast. completely different beast. I think it's important to get the message across again, that it doesn't have to be complicated. You don't have to enter as a very senior level, you know, expert in the cybersecurity field. There's a lot of tools out there, great podcasts like this one, right?

And resources to listen to and do that education piece, I think is really important. But at the same time, as I said, my career path started as a developer. I didn't even start as a cybersecurity expert. There are a lot of entryways. And in fact, in terms of careers, that's growing in the industry. It used to be more specific, as an example, just a malware analyst, that's quite specific. Nowadays, so many things with data science, as an example, machine learning models, those are very hot in our industry. There's not just one cybersecurity position, you have to understand there's many different ones. So it's important to understand the makeup of those positions. And it's much easier actually to find a fit nowadays, even at an entry level.

A big part of my leadership style is about interoperability, being able to have true teamwork between not only my team, because I have multiple departments in my team, but between other organizations at Fortinet too. That's a really important piece because as we discover new attack techniques, we got to make sure that we can share that information with relevant teams so that they can add safeguards from the development stack as an example

to protect against them. I think it's really important, just like we do with incident response, just like we do with defending against new threats and the whole speed theme on intelligence. It's the same thing with learning from mistakes. You have to definitely acknowledge it, own anything, step up to the plate, like I said,

and really try to move forward with that in stride as much as you can. I've always wanted to make an impact in terms of fighting the war on cybercrime. I expanded a lot beyond just my early days of a malware analyst. And today I'm actually wearing multiple hats, right? So I lead our global threat intelligence team. I have a team of malware analysts and reverse engineers who are still looking at the what's new and breaking it down and understanding the threat. I also wear a hat for the threat intelligence piece. So making sense of all of that data coming

in, how can we actually separate the signal from the noise, find new leads that we can use for threat hunting. And the other piece is industry. That's a big part of my job. Something I'm very passionate about is working with industry. I've been innovating for 15 years in the industry, building partnerships, private-to-private sector partnerships, private-public sector partnerships. It's all in an effort to fight cybercrime and to lead on disruption and really to try to make it more expensive for cybercriminals to operate. It's hard to find resources. As we know, there's always been a skills gap shortage. So we have to have rockstar performers.

And so I like to have everybody on my team who are really self-sufficient and independent, but working together. That's my leadership style. I like to empower people so that they can step up to the plate, own different aspects. Because again, we're juggling multiple things from our analysis to threat intelligence, to information sharing, to customer engagement and consulting and C-suite.

But all of that needs to come together under the hood. There's a lot of things looking back in my career and achievements that I'm definitely happy with. I wrote the original bylaws for the Cyber Threat Alliance, which got started. Actually, we started it, co-founded it back in 2014, set up zero-day research programs in the industry. There's a lot of things that have had an impact. But when I walk away, I would like to really see a reduction, like a dent, if you will, or hopefully a crater in cybercrime itself. Unfortunately, as I said, it's been a problem that we've observed that profits are just,

you know, we talk about a trillion, multi-trillion dollar industry now. That has to be reduced. We need to see more people arrested. And that's why I'm working with UberPool. I'm on an expert working group with them. And seeing more impacts like that, that I can walk away with, it's just going to make me with a more rosy feeling in my stomach. Thank you. to say Delete.me is a game changer. Within days of signing up, they started removing my personal information from hundreds of data brokers.

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