Matthew Schlesinger Email & Phone Number

I’m a data scientist – who works in email security – which makes me think about cats. Yes, cats. 🙀😾😺Why cats? It’s pretty simple, actually: threat actors craft emails with malicious attachments and URLs, socially-engineered messages, irresistible gift-card offers – new attack methods are born every day – and meanwhile, email-security researchers design equally-clever and creative ways to find and catch the attacks.So, maybe you’re thinking: “OH! So you mean ‘you’re like a 🐈 and the malicious emails are the 🐁🐁🐁!’” That’s a great guess, but nope, not what I mean. It’s even simpler than that. Really, I just sometimes wish that detecting phish and account takeovers and lookalike domains were as straightforward and well-defined as, well, detecting cats in pictures. In comparison, email security is actually a thousand times more challenging than spotting even a well-hidden cat in a photo. Because cats are furry and have tails and look like cats and (usually) don’t wear camouflage. But malicious emails are not only carefully designed to evade detection, but also, the techniques and strategies that are used to fool and manipulate unsuspecting recipients can and do change on a daily basis. If that weren’t challenging enough, consider this: machine learning has established methods for analyzing and classifying images and text, but emails are not...so...simple. Instead, emails are a crazy, wild-west mixture of digital and analog data: all kinds of infrastructure and authentication data in the header, text in the subject and body, and then let’s add in URLs (…ahem, would you mind detonating that link in a sandbox and tell me what happens, please?), attachments, logos, signatures, inline images…the list goes on. Anyway, that’s my job and I absolutely love it. Somedays I do wish it were as easy as finding a cat in an image, or scanning the body of the message for the phrase, “Nigerian prince,” but honestly, it’s because it’s so important and challenging that makes it worth doing.

Listed skills include Artificial Neural Networks, Reinforcement Learning, Genetic Algorithms, Infant Development, and 23 others.