CyberWire Daily - Richard Melick: Finding the right pattern to solve the problem. [Threat reporting] [Career Notes]

Episode Date: June 26, 2022

Richard Melick, Director of Threat Reporting for Zimperium, talks about his journey, from working in the military to moving up to the big screens. He shares that he's been in the business of solving unique cybersecurity problems for so long that he has found his own path that works very well for him. He says, "if I go to a unique problem and try to solve it, I find that I'm solving it the same way that I would've solved it five years ago, because I found my pattern." Richard reflects on his time working in the industry, from moving away from the military and into different roles over the years. He notes that giving credit where credit is due, to those who deserve it, is how you keep the audience engaged as a storyteller. We thank Richard for sharing his story. 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 Richard Malek. I'm the Director of Threat Reporting over at Zemperium. I want to be an aeronautical engineer. And a lot of my friends in elementary school and middle school,

their parents were scientists and engineers. And I very fondly recollect the meeting of one of my friend's dads who designed the first soda machine to go into space. And I got fascinated with it. And I thought, you know what? I'm going to go design my own aircraft when I get older and start my own aircraft company. Then it was a realization a little bit further on

that right around high school that's like, oh wait, that requires a lot more math than I really like. And not to say I'm bad at math, it's just who wants to do math every single day of their career? And so I found my calling in writing. But ultimately, college was not for me right away.

Diagnosed early on with ADD and ADHD. I knew my junior year that if I went to college, I would drop out. So I ended up joining the Marine Corps. And that kind of set me on the path that got me to where I am today. After four years, it was time for me to get out. And I had this dream of being an English teacher. So Marine Corps released me from their grasp. And I went to University of Northern Colorado.

I go for my first semester and did a tour of a high school. It took two hours for me to realize that was not a good choice. Just focused on writing and communication strategies and graduated college in three and a half years and started picking up little contracts here and there. I applied for this job at a company that was literally four miles from my house. I had no idea what they did, but they were looking for somebody to do evangelism, communications, help with community development and social media development of their products. And so my first step into cybersecurity was with WebRoot.

And it just, it started to click. I was able to take my knowledge as a network administrator and the security protocols that we'd build out for all the various networks that we built, the computer management, being a customer of multiple security products, a practitioner. I'm having to deal with threats on that side.

And how did I apply that as a communicator, as a writer, into this space that I was very unfamiliar with? And it slowly but surely started to fall in place for me. I realized that I had found my space. And it was taking highly technical conversations, highly technical situations, and explaining it in different levels for different kinds of audience members. It could be highly technical individuals themselves, or it could be down to the bean counters, the accountants that had no clue what was going on, but just wanted to make sure that their investment was going in the right space. I always said that if I can explain it to my dad and he gets excited about it, I've done a good job. So I started getting more involved at WebRoot and started getting more involved with the product line and understanding it, learning to pitch, learning the products inside and out, doing demos, being trained as an SE while being on the marketing side until I caught the attention of then up and

comer silence. And Brian Gale was the VP of product marketing over there. He had hired a good friend of mine and my friend had passed on my name to him and he called me up and we had some great interviews, great meetings. And within four weeks, I had a job offer. So now it was going from the small screen to the big screen in my world. All of a sudden it wasn't just online and a couple of different shows. This was living in a hotel room for 200 nights a year, traveling around the world, being a technical spokesperson for this organization and this product and the technology that Silence was presenting to the world. Silence got bought by BlackBerry and becomes a big corporation.

And I'm not a big corporation guy. I like building. I like the idea of helping to tell the story, not telling a story that other people have told before. And this has really impacted my leadership opportunities and my team building approach significantly. So I ended up leaving BlackBerry after three and a half years, joined Audimox, which is a great opportunity in that space. I was stuck around there for about a year and a half, helped to build out some of the rapid response, getting in the press. Ended up leaving there, and I joined here at Zimperium, the mobile security space, to really drive the endpoint security product for the mobile device.

I've been doing this long enough that if I go to a unique problem and try to solve it, I find that I'm solving it the same way that I would have solved it five years ago because I found my pattern. I found what works for me. And I think that kind of gets us into a cycle of just rinse and repeat, looking at the problems that we need to solve both as a company and as an industry. And I'm saying, okay, who can I bring in that's going to bring a unique approach to this i don't want someone necessarily that's been doing the same thing for 30 years i want someone's going to come in with a little bit of a fresh mindset that's transitioning maybe out of one specific career path into this career path be a product marketing technical marketing, whatever. It's all a team effort. It's just like the marketing sales relationship. You see so much celebration over organization sales, but you don't see a lot of celebration over the organization's engineering development

or prowess or patents. This is the industry as a whole. This is a reflection on the industry. You see a lot of LinkedIn posts about, oh, I got to go to President's Club and look at all the success I made in sales. Not many companies are inviting the people who literally made the product to be successful. And when we sit there and think about credit and giving credit, we've got a lot of those kind of people in this industry. this industry, people who have worked really hard in their previous careers to solve problems and found their way over into cybersecurity, they deserve so much of the credit. It's not just making up the mathematical equations. It's understanding, like, how do we look at it different? Again, kind of like that solving of the problem from a marketing perspective.

I love telling stories and I'm able to apply my fascination and attraction to machine learning and artificial intelligence and the science behind it. It it's in a very similar way that Dave DeFore did, in a very similar way that I saw Stuart McClure do with silence. I'm able to apply that kind of approach to it. And then, so the audience is sitting there getting involved, getting invested, getting bought into those numbers, getting bought into those mathematical algorithms

and believing it. That's the prowess that we need to see more of. And now, a message from Black Cloak. Did you know the easiest way for cybercriminals to bypass your company's defenses is by targeting your executives and their families at home? Black Cloak's award-winning digital executive protection platform secures their personal devices, home networks, and connected lives. Because when executives are compromised at home, your company is at risk. In fact, over one-third of new members discover they've already been breached.

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