How her work illustrates the difference Talos’ vulnerability research team makes
When Kelly Patterson first learned how to code by making small programs in her high school class, she preferred breaking her creations to building them.
She’d make a game and then spend double the time debugging that same code, looking for holes in her work.
Today, she’s always looking for what’s wrong with other people’s code, whether that be in a wireless router, IoT speaker, or an open-source software stack that dates back to 1991.
Patterson (né Leuschner) is one of the researchers that make up Talos’ Vulnerability Discovery team, a group of reverse-engineers, penetration testers and general expert coders who look for vulnerabilities in firmware, software and hardware and help the creators fix those issues.
Patterson and her teammates are responsible for helping to disclose and patch more than 200 security vulnerabilities a year, some of which affect devices used in thousands of households around the world, and others that support everything from industrial control systems to critical infrastructure.
Specifically for Patterson, she enjoys looking at hardware and its accompanying firmware. She began her IT career as a systems engineer but quickly found that she was more interested in debugging what she was working on, so she started pursuing projects outside of the office that allowed her to reverse-engineer code and talk about it publicly. This eventually led her to Talos, which was specifically attractive because it allowed her to be a researcher full-time.
“I like to spread the word that these bugs are still out there and we’re finding them, proving that we haven’t ‘solved’ security completely,” Patterson said.
One of her first and most memorable projects at Talos was
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