CTI? I Hardly Know Her!
Hello!
My name is Jen. I work in cyber threat intelligence (CTI). That would make me “Cyber Threat Intelli-Jen.” 🙋♀️
I’ve been in CTI since 2019. But the journey getting here has been very “wibbly wobbly timey wimey.” For those interested in that story, hey thanks! Keep reading! However, I won’t be offended if you skip down to the present!
My Background
Tech was never on my radar. I graduated from the University of Wisconsin - Madison in December of 2013 with my bachelors in Rehabilitation Psychology. I love my degree to this day. Those classes taught me how to be a better human, but I digress. Out of college, I worked several in-home care jobs (and love and miss them all) culminating in a managerial role for one house of three clients. There were multiple weeks of 100 hours of work as some clients needed overnight care. While I was exhausted, that job, the clients, the staff, and my coworkers are a large part of who I am today.
Quitting that job was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do. Another quick aside, but I thought that all of my clients would miss me terribly and I was petrified that their quality of care would decline. When in actuality, everything was fine. What an amazing lesson to know that not only is the world not entirely about you, but that there are other absolutely incredible people on this planet that have hearts just as big, if not bigger, than yours. But a friend had shared that the Apple store actively sought and hired empathetic people with the tech focux as secondary. As an empath with little tech skills, it sounded right up my alley.
Apple was another ginormous learning and growing milestone. I had nightmares every night to start, then they faded to weekly over the 3ish years I was there. It was always the same general nightmare: I don’t know how to troubleshoot the phone or ipad and I get yelled at and fired. Of course, that never happened and I created lifelong friends that always helped me out when I was battling a device issue.
A lot of my friends from Apple moved to tech companies in various roles. I followed some of my good friends to a SaaS company where I started in IT. Gone were the days of saying “if it’s not Apple, we aren’t really able to troubleshoot it.” If it was broken, it was officially my problem. Printers, fax machines, Windows machines, AV equipment, you name it, I was responsible for it. I was drinking from the fire hose of information yet again, but this time I had fewer nightmares.
The security team at said company sometimes needed IT support. I mean, who doesn’t? My hand went up any time they asked. After helping them out a few times, a spot on the team opened up. I applied and got the job! I was on a SOC of 6 in 2018 and we are now 25 strong in 2025! A year after joining the security team, the powers that be decided we needed a CTI function. I was selected as one of two analysts under a manager, we all went to Vegas and did SANS FOR578 Cyber Threat Intelligence Training and, well, now you’re all caught up!
Present
I love being a CTI analyst. My ADHD lives for the pivoting and rabbit holes that come with my role. I’d love to someday be a speaker at a conference and present some super cool, novel research findings that my team and I uncovered. That’s the dream. Ideally at DEFCON.
Until then, I’ll be putting together some blog posts and am open to ideas for topics! I’d love to dig into some lesser known threat actors or maybe put together some labs that go through their techniques.
I made this site as a way to give back to the community. People are often interested in CTI so I pull together all of my favorite, disparate resources one-by-one, but after a few times, I decided to put it all in one easy-to-find place!
I really hope you find it helpful and would love any and all feedback you may have.
Thank you so much, stay safe out there, and have a fantastic day,
Jen
