Senior Behavioural Threat Researcher

About Us Sophos is a global leader and innovator of advanced security solutions that defeat cyberattacks, including Managed Detection and Response (MDR) and incident response services and a broad portfolio of endpoint, network, email, and cloud security technologies. As one of the largest pure-play cybersecurity providers, Sophos defends more than 600,000 organizations and more than 100 million users worldwide from active adversaries, ransomware, phishing, malware, and more. Sophos’ services and products connect through the Sophos Central management console and are powered by Sophos X-Ops, the company’s cross-domain threat intelligence unit. Sophos X-Ops intelligence optimizes the entire Sophos Adaptive Cybersecurity Ecosystem, which includes a centralized data lake that leverages a rich set of open APIs available to customers, partners, developers, and other cybersecurity and information technology vendors. Sophos provides cybersecurity-as-a-service to organizations needing fully managed security solutions. Customers can also manage their cybersecurity directly with Sophos’ security operations platform or use a hybrid approach by supplementing their in-house teams with Sophos’ services, including threat hunting and remediation. Sophos sells through reseller partners and managed service providers (MSPs) worldwide. Sophos is headquartered in Oxford, U.K. More information is available at www.sophos.com.

Role Summary

Malware Researcher? Red/Blue/Purple team member? We have a fantastic opportunity here at Sophos Labs for a Threat Researcher role to join our global team of Behavioural Protection engineers, to hunt, to research, and to add real-time protection for suspicious activity across our customer environments. Our team of skilled security experts combine their passion to detect & disrupt cyber-attacks with their capability to develop protection rules that can cut through the noise in modern computing environments to tease out attacker’s nefarious activities. You are intrinsically motivated to understand the core logic behind malware and hacking attacks, to find & predict new ways attackers will modify their techniques and take great satisfaction in developing robust protection logic that is immune to evasive actions. You will be responsible for writing behavioural protection rules that are able to block malicious activities across all types of TTP (even if a Mitre Technique doesn’t exist yet). This is the foundation of Sophos next-gen approach. Above all - you enjoy thinking creatively; combining your deep technical knowledge, your tenacity for innovation, and your can-do attitude to solve complex and challenging problems on daily basis. Additionally, you will also be supporting our remediation effort to remove artifacts left behind, by writing clean-up rules, and supporting our Sandbox development, such as (but not limited to) creating signatures, identifying evasion techniques that prevent the sandbox from running the threat smoothly.

What You Will Do

• Conduct in-depth behavioural analysis of Windows threats
• Develop Behavioural rules for various threat behaviours including hands-on keyboard attack, malware payloads, initial attack vectors and Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs)
• Produce quality threat analysis reports for both internal and external audience
• Assist in sandbox improvements by analysing malware that hinders the sandbox environment in running the threat, which deploys various anti-analysis techniques
• Develop Clean-up rules to remove artifacts that are left behind by the behavioural protection rules.
• Collaborate with other cross-functional teams to improve behavioural protection capability based on the threat analysis
• Guide and train junior team members in assisting malware analysis, peer code review
• Assist in the development of tools wherever necessary to improve day-to-day task

What You Will Bring

• Strong knowledge of Windows Internals including Memory management, Processes, Threads.
• Proficiency in both static and dynamic analysis of threats, using tools such as IDAPro, WinDbg
• Demonstrated programming experience. Preferred: Python, Lua.
• Excellent communication skills with the ability to demonstrate complex technical problem to peer researchers as well as to product engineering team
• Excellent analytical and problem-solving skills with the ability to think strategically and creatively
• Bachelor’s degree in computer software (Computer Security preferable) or equivalent experience