Tribe of Hackers Red Team

12Mike Felch

“Challenge everything. Don’t think more highly of yourself than you ought. Invest in people and relationships. Place first priority on growing in your character and learning technology second.”

Twitter: @ustayready

Mike Felch is a red team lead and security researcher at Black Hills Information Security. Prior to joining BHIS, he was vice president of Security Research for an InfoSec startup leading technical teams and exploiting hardware. Throughout his career, he’s held roles as a software engineer, pentester, and system administrator. Mike is a divergent thinker who enjoys cognitive challenges and understands the power of collaboration. He’s actively involved in the InfoSec community and regularly open sources red team tools. You will either find him with his wife, Angela, and daughters at InfoSec conferences or in prison, investing in the lives of incarcerated men.

How did you get your start on a red team?

I wish I had an easy answer, but my journey was not the typical path most people take. Most of my life I’ve been accused of being argumentative because of challenging the typical way of thinking by questioning everything, rarely giving up, and bending the rules. I grew up in a household where my dad reverse engineered my console games, Unix System V Release 4 was on floppy disks in my mom’s Avon boxes, and I never had to worry about dial-up because we ...