Tribe of Hackers Red Team

19Brian Genz

“I think the most important three things you should do if you want to get a red team job are to decide you can, decide you belong, and decide you will chew through any and all gnarly obstacles encountered along the way and emerge, undaunted, as a member of a red team on the other side.”

Twitter: @briangenz

Brian Genz leads the red team at Splunk. He has information security experience spanning multiple sectors, including defense intelligence, manufacturing, finance, and insurance. Brian has worked in the areas of security assessments, vulnerability management, security architecture, and DFIR/threat hunting. He also serves as an intelligence officer in the U.S. Army Reserve with a focus on cybersecurity and is an instructor with GTK Cyber for the black-hat training called “Applied Data Science and Machine Learning for Cybersecurity.” He holds two graduate degrees, an MBA and an MS in information technology, and multiple industry certifications.

How did you get your start on a red team?

I took a very nontraditional path to offensive security. I had just returned from a deployment to the Ninevah Province in Iraq in 2010, where I’d had the honor and privilege of serving as a long-range surveillance (LRS) company commander. Shortly after coming home, I went to work in the IT infrastructure group at a global manufacturing company.

I quickly realized that I had walked ...