Tribe of Hackers Red Team

29Chris Nickerson

“The precursor to getting better at any craft is to understand it from as many viewpoints as possible.”

Twitter: @indi303

Chris Nickerson, CEO of Lares, has spent the last 20 years of his career leading, inspiring, and sometimes irritating the security industry. With Lares cofounder Eric M. Smith, he created the unique methodology used at Lares to assess, implement, and manage information security realistically and effectively. Collaborating with a group of other InfoSec researchers, he founded the Penetration Testing Execution Standard (PTES) and is working with the Red Team Alliance Training Collective to create a certification for red team testing. Chris is one of the founders of the Security BSides conferences, and he’s been a keynote, speaker, and/or trainer at more than 50 InfoSec conferences worldwide, including DEF CON, CyberWeek, and BlackHat. He’s a member and certification holder with ISACA, is on the board of CREST, and holds CISSP, CISA, BS7799, and NSA IAM certifications. His book Red Team Testing is upcoming from Elsevier/Syngress. Despite all that, he is perhaps best known for his appearance on the TV show Tiger Team on TruTV and his TED Talk Hackers are all about curiosity, and security is just a feeling.

How did you get your start on a red team?

In my early days at Sprint we had a task force put together to show the actual impact of vulnerabilities ...