Alex Ryan: From zero chill to quiet confidence
Welcome to another episode of Humans of Talos, our ongoing video interview series that celebrates the people powering Cisco’s threat intelligence efforts. In each episode, we dive deep into the personal journeys, motivations and lessons learned from the team members who help keep the internet safe.
This time, we sit down with Alex Ryan, a seasoned Incident Commander from Cisco Talos Incident Response. Read (or watch) on to hear her candid reflections on the emotional intensity of incident response, the critical role of a supportive team in preventing burnout, and invaluable advice for aspiring cybersecurity professionals.
Amy Ciminnisi: Alex, you were recently on the Beers with Talos podcast, and during that, we learned that you have two liberal arts degrees, but you found yourself really loving how machines and systems worked, and then you work your way through the cybersecurity ranks. I’d love to know: What brought you to Talos?
Alex Ryan: During my career inside companies doing incident response, vulnerability management, and risk management, Talos Intelligence was often one of my sources. I often looked at intelligence from vendors who were using their own datasets to generate the finished intelligence, rather than those who just took whatever intelligence was already out there, re-mashed it, and enriched it a bit. I have a lot of respect for Talos from using them as a source for guiding how I would do incident response and prioritize my defenses and things like that. When the opportunity came up to join Cisco Talos Incident Response as an Incident Commander, it was that reputation (and having used their material for so long which showed that there was really good quality people and research being done) that put this job at the top of my list of choices.
AC: You have a very difficult job as an Incident Commander, acting as the point person in situations where people are possibly going through the worst days of their careers. What’s something about your day-to-day role that people might be surprised by or interested in?
AR: Incident response is a very high pressure situation to be in. You need to exude quiet confidence and build a trust relationships quickly with your customer. But on the back end, things can be chaotic: trying to get access to machines, trying to find the right machines. “Do we have the right IOCs?” “What is this thing? Let me reverse engineer it.” Trying to distill all of that activity into larger topics and give progress to the customer on it is critical.
It’s also high risk for the business being impacted. I think that there was a statistic at one point that about 70% of small to medium businesses that paid the ransom after being compromised went out of business within a year, because the ransom was such a financial hit that they just couldn’t absorb that kind of impact. So while the customer is trying to not freak out, I’m trying to exude quiet confidence while managing the forensics analysis activity. Trying to balance all of that is quite difficult, so incident response has a very high burnout rate.
After I came back from raising my children, it took me about two years to detox completely from incident response. I was really high strung, and I had no chill. Zero chill. I had to learn how to say no and how to prioritize my family over this hero complex that I was having at work. I would say I’m a much more well-rounded person now, and perhaps I’m better at my job because of that.
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