Katie Nickels
More info
- Affiliation
- MITRE, Red Canary, SANS
- Known for
- MITRE ATT&CK, threat intelligence
The threat intelligence analyst who led MITRE ATT&CK as it went from an internal spreadsheet to the industry's shared vocabulary.
Nickels was ATT&CK lead at MITRE around 2018–2020, the years when MITRE ATT&CK stopped being a specialist catalogue and became the thing vendors, SOC teams and procurement officers point at to explain what a detection actually covers. Her contribution was less about new techniques than about method: how to map an incident report to the framework without inventing what the report doesn't say.
She went on to run intelligence at Red Canary and teaches the SANS course on threat intelligence. A recurring theme: a heatmap full of green squares tells you more about how the mapping was done than about how secure the organisation is.