Alissa Torres
Alissa Torres is passionate about security operations and empowering analysts to succeed in blue team ops. Her professional experience in various security roles over her career includes forensic investigations, enterprise incident response and threat hunting, security services consulting, and incident response management. Alissa currently serves as Senior Threat Hunter at Palo Alto Networks. Having taught as principal faculty for several pivotal cybersecurity training institutions over the last decade, Alissa has engaged hundreds of skilled professionals around the world, growing a legion of artifact hunters who share a common affinity for adversary tracking.
Sessions
Testing security controls is hard. Really hard. Every incident responder has lived with victims who are sure existing security controls should have prevented or detected the intrusion. While some organizations don’t do any security control validation, those that do understand the challenges. While red team operations allow for point-in-time validation, how are organizations dealing with control validations during product updates or configuration changes? By and large the answer is “they aren’t.” On this panel, we’ll discuss why control validation is difficult. Then we’ll discuss recommendations for scaling control validation operations in practically any organization.
The Security Operations Center: is it really more than a place to go where dreams die? So many analysts feel that there’s no way to improve and they’re in a dead end job. How can you turn your nightmare into something more bearable? By the end of this panel, you will gain a series of tips and tricks to take back to your SOC, you will learn how to get the most from your individual experience, lift up your team around you, or at least recognize when it’s time to run like mad.