Week 1. Lares.
Some months back, when Andrew Hay decided to join forces with Lares founders Chris Nickerson and Eric Smith, the security community cheered the move from the sidelines, myself included. I regarded their ‘teaming up’ as strategically epic for our industry. Now, I am a part of this talented team, which I could never have imagined or posited. Co-founder, Eric Smith, succinctly said to me, “Welcome home.” Indeed, becoming a part of this highly capable group feels like home.
I’ve been a Lares client (more than once) in the past and a collaborator for a decade. Joining the team is a natural transition for me, having worked at security boutique @stake and services companies Optiv and Navisite. I also bring lessons-learned, working in large enterprises (e.g., TJX, PTC, to name a few) where I have survived a few battles and lost countless others. I believe these combined experiences in both consumer and service provider roles with emphases on offensive security and incident response help me empathize with business stakeholders facing ever-changing security challenges. I bring a deep passion to Lares to see the clients we serve, succeed in their security journeys. This core mission aligns with my own – providing truthful insight for our clients about their security postures and serving as sherpas along the path to security maturity.
To that end, in my advisory services role, I hope to right-size our expert services towards improved mature postures and security outcomes for our customers as part of our virtual CISO (vCISO) practice. Our wealth of adversarial knowledge combined with our risk assessment approach affords us a vantage point to uniquely empower clients to succeed securely in business.
In short, I am excited (‘did I say that already?’), honored, and humbled to be a part of this high caliber team. Together, I am confident that we will build on the Lares tradition of making customers more durable in any given threat landscape. I hope I can match wits (‘good luck with that’ – I say to myself) with the incredibly smart folks here at Lares – to have “iron sharpen iron.”
Let’s go to work.
Mark Arnold has a 15+ cybersecurity career, serving 8 of those years in leadership roles. As a transformational leader, Mark has built security teams and programs, authored maturity model blueprints to optimize risk management processes, and implemented security domain practices at large enterprises and service providers. Mark’s areas of interest include cloud security, threat intelligence, and vulnerability research, nation-state attack methods and related activities (e.g. information operations and disinformation campaigns) and their collective impact on nations and society. Mark recently completed an executive education cohort on the intersection of cybersecurity and technology at Harvard’s Kennedy School.
