Microsoft recognizes Katie Nickels for her impact on the security community

We are proud to announce that Microsoft has awarded Katie Nickels, Red Canary’s Director of Intelligence Operations, its Security Changemaker award at its 2023 Security Excellence Awards. The award celebrates “an individual who has shaped the security landscape and made a remarkable security contribution to their company or to the larger security community.”

There is no doubt about Katie’s remarkable contribution to both Red Canary and the larger security community. As Red Canary’s Director of Intelligence Operations, Katie leads the strategic direction for threat hunting and intelligence and manages Red Canary’s threat hunters, intelligence analysts, malware analysts, and intelligence engineers. She’s driven significant improvements to our intelligence processes that deliver relevant information—both threat detections and critical context—to our customers faster and in a more consumable format.

“You’d be hard-pressed to find anyone in cyberthreat intelligence that hasn’t learned from Katie Nickels.”

— Selena Larson, former CNN cybersecurity analyst

She began making an impact on the cybersecurity community at large during her five-year tenure at MITRE, where she played a critical role in refining the MITRE ATT&CK® framework and making it easier to understand for both technology vendors and security professionals. Adam Pennington, the MITRE ATT&CK lead, told Protocol that Katie “came in and cleaned it up, did some incredible analysis on it and built up our practices and our standards.” That work, combined with her acting as the go-to public speaker about the framework, led to its rapid adoption from 2015 to 2020. She continues driving change in the broader security community while serving as a Non-resident Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council and a SANS Certified Instructor.

Katie’s recognition comes as Red Canary recently surpassed $100M in annual recurring revenue and introduced Readiness Exercises, a new way to prepare for cybersecurity incidents, unifying training, tabletops, and atomic tests. Red Canary’s ability to impact the community is made stronger through our partnership with Microsoft. By providing industry-best detection and response across cloud workloads, identities, SaaS applications, networks, and endpoints, Red Canary is able to find and stop threats no matter where they occur.

If you’d like to learn from Katie, you can follow her on Twitter, attend one of her upcoming SANS courses, or check out her Red Canary blog posts.