Larry Cashdollar: Always learning new technology. [Intelligence response engineer]

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1:00Security teams get real-time alerts and one of the largest deep and dark web intelligence pools in the industry. Cyber criminals may already be looking for your weak spots. Don't make it easy for them. Either one that's prepared. Defend your business with Nord Stellar. Use the code CyberWire10 to unlock your exclusive discount. Go to nordstellar.com slash CyberWireDaily and learn more. Hello, my name is Larry Cashdaller and I am a Principal Security Intelligence Response Engineer at Akamai Technologies. If you look at my 1986 yearbook, I think it was my sixth grade class, it says computer scientist for my career path. So I had a love of computers when I was really young.

2:03I guess I knew what field I wanted to get into right off the bat. My school in New York City, this is Brooklyn in the 1980s, was one of the first schools in New York to get computers. So I had a computer class where they were teaching us just basic programming. And then my family had relocated to Maine and the first school I had gone to didn't have a computer course. This was four-size school. It wasn't into computers at all. I kind of drifted away. I was struggling with being relocated and ended up moving away again and going to a school which had a computer science department. And I ended up signing up for programming courses. I had a roommate who was also in a computer science class.

3:05And he didn't have a computer so he would come over and use mine. You know, I'd let him use school work. And I remember losing track of my friend for about a week. So I go to his room and I knock on the door and my friend had discovered Linux. And what happened was he had installed it on his computer and had just stopped leaving his room for a week. He says, you got to see this. And I'm like, okay, so I come and he goes, it's Linux. And I'm like, what is that? He's like, it's Unix for your computer. So then we went upstairs and I partitioned my hard drive to give me some space to take some windows off and install Linux. And the windows partition got smaller and smaller and it's got deleted. And then I just started learning more about computer security and hacking. And we joined a Linux club at University of Southern Maine. And from there, it just sort of spiraled off into eventually. I had left college and I had gotten a job at a local company called Netmain,

4:10which was a security company. And I was doing a lot of penetration testing there. That was really my proving ground for just learning about basic security. So that's where my career really started to gain roots. You know, I was being paid, I think, at the time $7 an hour. And my wife who was working at the hospital was making $9 an hour. And she was working part time there, but she was working a little bit less time than I was working full time. And she was making nearly what I was making. So I decided that I was going to leave and join computer sciences cooperation. And I had applied there because my friend Chalk had left and said, hey, you know, if you know, you should come up here and get a job, you'll make more money. He's like, there's a lot more stuff to do. And it's just a better environment. So I'm like, okay. So I applied. And the person interviewing me just happened to be one of the guys that my father had worked with

5:15when he had worked near or with BIW for years. So I kind of knew the guy interviewing me. And I guess I answered everything spectacularly because he called me an hour later and offered me a job. That made sort of set me on the course. And that computer sciences cooperation gave me a field to hone my skills on. And then jumped from that to going to out to California for a year and doubling my income and moving up in the ranks of Units Administrator. And then finally getting a job at Akamai. And I was told I had a fan base in Akamai that were watching me and they were cheering me on. I guess it was this plan concocted to eventually get me into the infosec group. I guess it took years but eventually I ended up getting pulled into the infosec group. They had a tabletop exercise at Akamai where they would pretend that a system was being broken into and then they would sort of ask what sort of actions would you take.

6:18And it turned out that this meeting was kind of like an interview for me that I didn't know about. And so eventually after this tabletop exercise which I guess I had a lot of input into, I got a phone call from the manager for the C-Certs. Hey, how would you like a job in information security group doing what you do at night? Come join my team, you'll be able to go to DEF CON, you'll go to conferences, you'll go to trainings, you'll work with customers on doing security. He's like, you're going to be focused on the security of the internet as a whole so you can do all sorts of research that you want to do. And you'll have a lot of fun, it'll be great. And I thought about it for a day and I'm like, you know, I have to do this. This is my real passion. So I decided to join the InfoSet Group and it's been great sense. I've almost been at Akamai for I think it's 22 years this August next month. It will be my 22nd year at Akamai.

7:19There's so much more new technology now than there was 20 years ago. The computing world was way more simpler. You know, you had a server and a client. And now you have a server client, the cloud, edge systems that are contacting the cloud and the cloud is not really cloud. It's just someone else's computer. There's all sorts of frameworks now. You know, there's content management systems. There's just dozens of things that you can learn now and you can't expect to be an expert in all of them. It's good to get familiar with as many as you can, but it's a lot to juggle. And it's when I was 25 years old and you know, my wife was on second shift. And all we had was a dog. It was easy to just say, well, I'm going to take this block of time and just read and do this stuff. Now it's like, well, I want to take my son, go carting today. And my wife wants to go out and have some beers and listen to live music tonight. So I'm going to go do that. I'm not going to sit on the computer because honestly, my family wouldn't let me anyway.

8:21So it's a big challenge. And as you get older, it probably gets harder because there's just more of their distractions. I don't know. I hope people use my work to learn from and just enjoy. And if it inspires somebody, you know, that's great. If somebody sees something that I've done and says, hey, you know, I'd like to do something like that. And it gets them into the field or it gets them excited about something or it gets them to find their own CVE and document it. You know, that's a win for me. If you only attend one cybersecurity conference this year, make it RSAC 2026. It's happening March 23rd through the 26th in San Francisco. Bringing together the global security community for four days of expert insights, hands-on learning and real innovation.

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