If state-sponsored actors are after one thing, it’s to spread fear and uncertainty across the internet.
There’s always money to be made targeting individual businesses and organizations, but for James Nutland’s work, it’s always about the bigger picture. And his background in studying counterterrorism and interpersonal social dynamics provides him a unique perspective on APTs’ goals and methods.
Nutland, an analyst with Cisco Talos’ Threat Intelligence and Interdiction team, didn’t begin his journey into cybersecurity through the traditional pathways. Instead, he went to college to obtain his bachelor’s degree in social psychology, particularly interested in social engineering, eventually obtaining his master’s in counterterrorism from the University of East London.
That may sound like a degree someone gets to serve on a physical battlefield, but as Nutland puts it, security research and counterterrorism carry some of the same throughlines.
“It’s providing you a set of skills you can then use in multiple modalities,” he said. “It’s the analysis, the eagerness to delve into the unknown, to assess swathes of noisy information, picking out the pieces to establish different threads to try and establish patterns and hopefully attribution — it’s that kind of analytical investigative thinking that really helps for threat hunting.”
Nutland (right) speaking at MITRE ATT&CK Con last year.Nutland’s technical experience comes from his undergraduate days when he started working in tech support for his college. Eventually, he got into system administration work after he moved to the U.S. during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic.
After various roles protecting both business and academic environments, Nutland decided to apply to Talos essentially on a whim after seeing a job listing whilst researching IOCs on the Talos intelligence center. In his cu ..
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