Hello! I am a Cybersecurity Researcher @ Idaho National Laboratory and ongoing doctoral candidate at Dakota State University. If you don’t know me well, my main interests are malware analysis, reverse engineering, and - broadly speaking - cars (e.g. my 2006 Suzuki Grand Vitara XSport).
I have an orange tabby named, Clover. The #1 love of my life 🦁.
Research Interest
See my publications for recent research or works. Currently, I’m considering my doctoral thesis topic; which, is anywhere from hardware re and the development of purposfully vulnerable firmware for serial devices, to improved malware analysis methods via NLP models and intermediary language representation gathering.
Education
PhD Cyber Operations
Dakota State University, Madison, SD
Fall 2021 - Current
M.S. Computer Science
Dakota State University, Madison, SD
Graduated Fall 2020
B.S. Cyber Operations
Dakota State University, Madison, SD
Graduated Fall 2019
Experience
Cybersecurity Researcher
Idaho National Laboratory - Idaho Falls, ID
July 2021 - Current
Cybersecurity Intern
Idaho National Laboratory - Idaho Falls, ID
May 2020 - April 2021
- Broad understanding of threat intelligence formats and conversion techniques (MISP/Mitre Attack/TAXII/STIX)
- Use of relational graphs for both supervised and unsupervised machine learning modeling of extracted features from raw samples and threat intel
- Use of reverse engineering tools (IDA/Binary Ninja/Angr) for analysis of malware and extracted firmware.
- Remote/Telecommuted
Cybersecurity Intern
Northrop Grumman - Cincinnati, OH
May 2019 - August 2019
- Vulnerability research
- Hardware hacking over serial debug ports (JTAG/UART) with Shikra
- Bootloader memory scraping and firmware disassembly with Ghidra/Radare2
Cybersecurity Analyst
1st Financial Bank USA - Sioux Falls, SD
Februrary 2018 - May 2019
- Used collated information to identify, analyze, and report events that occur or might occur within the network to protect information, information systems, and networks from threats.
- Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)
- Incident Response/Policy Creation
- Remote/Telecommuted
Volunteer TA
Dakota State University - Madison, SD
January 2018 - Spring 2019
- CSC-304 Assembly Language
Cyclops Student Researcher
Dakota State University - Madison, SD
August 2017 - December 2018
- Sandboxing/Creating complete VM environments (VMWare, VirtualBox, Docker)
- Dynamic/Static analysis of malicious binaries (IDA/Radare2/Ghidra)
- Recognizing executable file formats (PE, ELF)
- Detection of packers/obfuscators
- Identifying use of Windows API (DLLs/Libraries, Functions)
- YARA signature creation and scripting
Awards
Award for Outstanding Undergraduate Research - South Dakota Student Research Poster Session, 2019
SFS CyberCorps Scholarship - Dakota State University/NSF, 2018-20
Clubs
I am the founder and previous President of Malwr Club (est. 2020-2022) @ Dakota State University.
Some relevant links:
And I participated as a member of DefSec @ DSU as well. As a part of the team for 2018 DOE CyberForce Competition, we placed fourth out of 70 teams nation-wide. Team Photo.
I also competed at ISEAGE, another CCDC sort of competition. I forget what place we took. Team Photo.
Publications
Flack, M; Kramer, N; Snyder, Z; Chona, E; Steckelberg, M; and Brizendine, B: Bust-A-Binary: Active Attribution and Analysis of Malware Campaigns
Flack, M; Brizendine, B: Feature Extraction and Analysis of Binaries for Classification
Flack, M; Foster, R; Xu, S: Graph Convolutional Network for Classifying Binaries with Control Flow Graph Data