My name is Pasquale Stirparo and I am a Cyber Threat Researcher.
Even though I’m a tech nerd at core, what I find extremely fascinating of this field is the intersection between technology, international relations, geopolitics, history, critical thinking, etc, because there is way more than just malware bits and bytes if you aim to grasp the full extent of the field. Because we are not just tracking a malware, but the adversaries who are behind it, their organizations and the socio-economical context they live in. You gotta understand it all.
I have another addiction to confess: I love reading! I just can’t stop :). This is why I started publishing some “thematic” reading lists, to share back with the community those books I read and found very interesting. Currently one on “Critical Thinking and Intelligence” and another one on “Leadership and Management”, you can find them in the related page in this site.
More on the professional side, I have been in the Information Security industry for about 15 years in the private sector and at the institutional level (for the EU), in Operational roles, as well as in Research.
Before starting as independent researcher in 2023, I was Principal Threat Hunter at Dragos, Inc., tracking threat groups in the ICS/Critical Infrastructure space, and before that I spent about 3 years as Security and Privacy Incident Manager at Google Zurich, where I was responsible for coordinating the response to major security and privacy incidents across all Alphabet, Google’s parent company. From 2015 to 2018 I worked in the Financial sector, leading and building incident response and threat intelligence teams. Finally, in the first part of my career I worked in the consulting space first and as researcher at the Joint Research Center (JRC) of the European Commission.
I’m the co-author of the book “Learning iOS Forensics” [1st Ed.][2nd Ed.], with the first edition published in March 2015 by Packt Publishing, which has received the Forensics 4cast Award as “Best Book of the Year” in 2016.
Still in 2015 I became member of the SANS Internet Storm Center, a great group of infosec professionals who volunteers to detect problems, analyze internet threats, and disseminate both technical as well as procedural information to the general public, and in 2016 I was Member of the Advisory Group on Internet Security to the Europol Cybercrime Centre (EC3).
In 2010 I contributed to the first development of the international standard “ISO/IEC 27037: Guidelines for identification, collection and/or acquisition and preservation of digital evidence” and I’ve been coordinator of ISO27037 Working Group for the Italian National Body.
More on the community side, I’m the co-founder and organizer of BSides Zürich security conference, while as for my education background, I hold:
- A Ph.D. in Information and Communication System Security from the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm;
- A M.Sc., and a B.Sc. in Computer Engineering from Polytechnic of Torino.
I have also spent a year as research associate at the Centre for Technology and Global Affairs at Oxford University, and attended the “State-Sponsored Cyber Threat Actors” Summer Program of the School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) at Johns Hopkins University.