Sr Threat Researcher - remote

The Role  

As a Sr.  Threat Researcher, you will spend time searching through data looking for threats, analyzing them, and making that information meaningful to our customers. Leveraging Proofpoint data, common threat intelligence data providers, information from trust groups, and other sources, you will be responsible for covering the threat landscape with a focus on financially-motivated threats (ecrime/cybercrime).

As an ecrime specialist you’ll communicate your findings to various groups including customers, fellow threat researchers, and teams who create detections in our products. You will also have the opportunity to present your research at public and private industry conferences. You’ll be a part of a team of dynamic and creative threat researchers focused on the threat landscape, finding threats, understanding them, and using that knowledge to improve our products and protect our customers.  Making research visible and useful for our customers is a large part of this role. 

• Monitor and analyze threat intelligence sources to stay abreast of new threats and tactics. 
• Collect, process, and disseminate intelligence to stakeholders in a timely and actionable manner. 
• Develop and maintain relationships with external organizations to improve information sharing and collaboration. 
• Identify gaps in collection, recommend, and participate in the implementation of solutions to fill those gaps. 
• Produce intelligence on current and emerging threats for various audiences: Proofpoint executives, public blogs and Proofpoint customers. 
• Use excellent analytical skills to work in a diverse team environment, exchanging ideas and data with developers, support, product managers, and customers. 

Your day-to-day  

• Hunt in Proofpoint’s proprietary telemetry sources to identify and cluster financially motivated threat activity. 
• Analyze attack chains, including phishing, malware and threat data from internal and external sources, with a focus on activity that has an email component. 
• Provide threat detection findings to detection teams as they create and deploy detections in our products 
• Occasionally conduct dynamic and static malware analysis on samples obtained from our customer data and threat hunting activity to assist in signature development 
• Piece together malicious campaigns, threat actors, and unattributed activity  
• Generate intelligence to support Proofpoint’s mission to protect our customers 
• Create and present written deliverables to multiple audiences, both external and internal. 
• Present complex technical topics to senior management, internal stakeholders, our customers, and peers 
• Expand upon existing intelligence to build profiles of tracked Threat Actors  
• Collaborate on research projects with the wider threat research team 

What you bring to the team 

• An empathetic approach to collaboration and a flexible attitude, ready to work with a close-knit team passionate about disrupting adversaries 
• A well-rounded understanding of the current threat landscape 
• Direct experience tracking ecrime actors, familiarity with their TTPs and key features that can be used for attribution. 
• Strong knowledge of Cyber Threat Intelligence principles to include indicators of compromise (IOC) types, indicator pivoting and indicator attribution strength. 
• Skills to profile and track actors efficiently, including Yara, infrastructure tracking, reverse engineering capabilities, indicator pivoting techniques and enough experience with a scripting language to automate various aspects of your work 
• The ability to make a hypothesis based on your threat research, prove or disprove it using our data, and communicate that information to our customers or internal stakeholders 
• Ability to comfortably communicate directly with customers and the security community 
• Experience with Network and Host malware detection engineering 
• Excellent interpersonal, organizational, writing, communications, and briefing skills 
• Motivation to dig through internal and open-source data to find threat information and use it to provide value to customers 
• Experience with various technologies used for hunting in big data sets 

Nice to have 

• Formal university-level education in computer science, computer security or another related discipline, or equivalent certifications and/or work experience 
• Information security community experience; a blog, website, published papers, conference presentations, or other experience on the public side of the security field 
• Experience working remotely for a large information security vendor 
• Familiarity with email delivery mechanisms (DNS, SMTP, etc) & common email formats (RFC822 headers, MIME) 
• Familiarity with email-borne threats and related analysis techniques 
• Familiarity with Suricata or Snort 
• Familiarity with interpreting malware sandboxing reports 
• Amazing presentation skills 

Why Proofpoint
Protecting people is at the heart of our award-winning lineup of cybersecurity solutions, and the people who work here are the key to our success.  We’re a customer-focused and a driven-to-win organization with leading-edge products. We are an inclusive, diverse, multinational company that believes in culture fit, but more importantly ‘culture-add’, and we strongly encourage people from all walks of life to apply.

We believe in hiring the best and the brightest to help cultivate our culture of collaboration and appreciation. Apply today and explore your future at Proofpoint! #LifeAtProofpoint