Moving up in cybersecurity: From help desk to FireEye to CEO | Cyber Work Podcast

From working the help desk to becoming FireEye’s Chief Security Strategist and founding his own company Kolide, Jason Meller has a wealth of experience to share about moving up the cybersecurity ladder. On today’s episode, he discusses his security journey, including working one of the best help desk jobs of all time, bluescreening his friends in the Wild West days of the Internet and sharing advice for up-and-coming cybersecurity professionals.

0:00 - Intro
2:22 - Pixar movie Soul and finding his "spark"
6:40 - The Wild West of cybersecurity
7:56 - Working at the best help desk ever
12:13 - Becoming a cyber threat analyst
18:02 - The importance of soft skills
21:23 - Becoming a chief security strategist at FireEye
24:38 - Working solo vs in a team
25:55 - Adding a new superpower with your talents
28:03 - Should you leave your job?
31:10 - Exploring the psychology of security
36:34 - Security veterans and mentorship
40:30 - What is Kolide?
44:30 - The new work/life balance of security
46:40 - Outro

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Jason Meller is the CEO and founder of Kolide. Jason has dedicated his career to building products and tools that enable security experts to successfully defend western interests from sophisticated and organized global cyber threats. He started his security and product career at GE's elite computer incident response team, led by Richard Bejtlich (the father of modern network security monitoring). From there, Jason moved to the legendary Mandiant corporation (acquired by FireEye) quickly working his way up from an entry level analyst position to becoming the Chief Security Strategist. As Chief Security Strategist at FireEye, Jason was responsible for rapidly building products and services with an engineering strike team to facilitate and grow high-profile partnerships and key strategic initiatives.

About Infosec

[RichardBejtlich]

It was a pleasure to work with Jason at GE. He didn't mention it, but two of his top contributions were our first company-wide campaign threat intel report, and a home-built incident tracking system.