Yordan is a seasoned cybersecurity professional with extensive experience in the fields of Threat Intelligence and Security Operations. His prior experience included hunting for advanced persistent threats for one of the world’s largest financial institutions. Coming from a DFIR background (GCFA, GNFA, GCIA) he is most well-versed in hunting for adversaries on enterprise networks and outside of them in-the-wild. Currently he is the SOC Manager for ExpressVPN where he is focused on protecting the privacy and security of millions of users across the globe.

Beyond Security Operations

Over the past few years the threat landscape has rapidly evolved, where adversaries, their tradecraft, tools and capabilities have increased in both complexity and in volume of operations. In the traditional SOC model this would typically mean throwing more budget, logs, vendor tools and human resource to develop a never ending corpus of alerts that lead to SOC fatigue way too often, along with the potential for control evasion due to overzealous allow listing.

In his presentation Yordan will share some of his team’s observations and success stories in applying Google’s “Future of SOC” model in standing up a modern SOC function within a fast paced privacy-oriented tech company. He will showcase pro tips in how to kickstart your threat modeling, threat intelligence or threat hunting programs, the importance of workflow automation (Terraform for detection engineering), the difference between analytics and alerts, what continuous threat hunting represents, and why it’s important to bring security operations as close as possible to the SDLC process. To emphasize all of the above he will share a few case studies and investigations performed by his team, along with the lessons they extracted from them