I’m very excited to announce the launch of the Digital Shadows’ Photon Research Team. We have decided to bolster our existing analyst capabilities with a dedicated team that is 100% focused on researching external digital risks and how threat actors leverage them to exploit organizations. I will be leading this team taking advantage of my experience in US Army Intelligence as well as my experience as a VP & Principal Analyst at Forrester Research.

Photon Research team pic

The word photon comes from Greek (phōs, photos) meaning “light.” I’m sure our retired Hellenic (Greek) Army Colonel, Isidoros is very pleased that we leveraged “photos” in our branding. In physics, a photon is a bundle of electromagnetic energy and photons make up the basic unit of all light. The Photon Research Team will illuminate the digital risks and threats that defenders face.

We don’t want to be a “self-licking ice cream cone” research group. I learned this term while serving in US Army Intelligence. For those that haven’t heard it before, a “self-licking ice cream cone” is a self-perpetuating system that has no purpose other than to sustain itself. We aren’t going to do research the sake of research. The Photon Research Team is going to provide practical content for the sake of our customers and the broader cybersecurity community. The practical component of our research is essential to us; we want to provide guidance that practitioners can take advantage of to make their lives easier. If our research doesn’t enable this, then there is no point.

For me, the most exciting aspect of our team are the people and our diversity. We are a global organization that speaks over twenty languages. We have researchers from a wide range of backgrounds ranging from traditional intelligence analysts like me to practitioners who build security tools, as well as data scientists who help us exploit the vast amount of Internet data that Digital Shadows collects. The diversity of our team will be the cornerstone of our research.

You can meet some of the team in this new video:

We look forward to producing practical research that makes your lives just a bit easier. Stay tuned for more and you can follow us on Twitter here.

 

Photon logo small