Bio

Crane Hassold is a subject matter expert in understanding social engineering attacks. Since 2015, he has built threat intelligence teams at three different cyber defense companies (Abnormal Security, Agari, PhishLabs), primarily focused on researching enterprise- and consumer-focused phishing threats. Prior to joining the private sector in 2015, Crane served as an Analyst at the Federal Bureau of Investigation for more than 11 years, providing strategic and tactical analytical support to cyber, financial crime, and violent crime cases. For most of his career with the FBI, Crane worked in the Behavioral Analysis Units in Quantico, Virginia, where he provided analytical and behavioral support (“profiling”) to intelligence community and law enforcement partners against national security adversaries and serial criminals. Crane has also been recognized as a subject matter expert in open source intelligence collection and has presented at numerous conferences about using successful analytical techniques. In 2012, Crane helped create the FBI’s Cyber Behavioral Analysis Center (CBAC), which takes an asymmetric approach to examining cyber threats by combining the traditional behavioral concepts used for decades in the violent crime world with technical expertise to gain a holistic understanding of adversary tactics, techniques and procedures (TTPs). Within CBAC, Crane provided analytical support for national security and criminal cyber cases, which included conducting empirical research to study the behavioral characteristics of cyber actors and malware genealogy; reverse-engineering malware to better understand adversary motivations and tactics (malware author profiling); performing forensic examinations of digital evidence to identify behavioral artifacts and investigative leads; and developing various behavioral products, such as threat actor profiles and technical threat assessments.