Security Research Engineer
Swimlane
Why Nominated: Josh Rickard constantly utilizes his knowledge and expertise to bolster the cybersecurity community, including leading webinars and writing blog posts available to the public that focus on automating malware analysis, employee offboarding with SOAR, the nuances of Microsoft's OAuth2 implementation and more.
Profile: Among Josh Rickard’s many accomplishments over the last year was his instrumental role in Swimlane receiving runner- up recognition in the 2019 Microsoft Graph Security Hackathon. Rickard is dedicated to bringing a focus to end users in the security industry because he views these people as the first and last lines of defense. To this end he focuses efforts on increasing their awareness and education.
Interested parties can find him at SecOps Hub — a vendor-neutral community of security professionals at all levels where he leads discussions in and generates content. Beyond participating in and releasing numerous open- source projects, including but not limited to rewriting portions of Red Canary’s Atomic Red Team and writing a Python library for the Mitre ATT&CK Framework called pyattck, Rickard has helped shape what a SOAR platform is capable.
By enabling IT and security teams to report and process spam and phishing emails in an automated fashion, Rickard has shifted the mentality from not caring as long as these messages ended up in the “deleted items” folder to proactive protection. Additionally, Rickard has demonstrated how users can automate simple tasks using scripting languages like PowerShell and Python.
What colleagues say: “Josh is one of those rare individuals that brings a perfect blend of technical knowledge, business savvy, people skills and a solid focus on the big picture. Josh always has his finger on the pulse of security and technologies and can seamlessly translate how that new technology can be leveraged to help businesses. Finally, he is the consummate team player — always going above and beyond and lending a hand wherever it is needed.” - Susan Warner, director of global marketing at Swimlane
Teri Robinson
