How to work in Incident Response: stopping breaches on the Blue Team

From reading CVs to reading logs. That’s the leap Marta Lopez Pardal, known as Martix, has made, and it makes for one of the most honest conversations about reinventing yourself professionally we’ve had on the channel. Marta worked in human resources, got laid off, threw caution to the wind and went to study the higher-level qualification knowing that what pulled at her was cybersecurity. Today she’s on the Blue Team, watching what the bad guys are doing inside organisations.

We talk about what Incident Response really involves, that discipline which kicks in when something has already gone wrong and you have to contain, investigate and throw out the intruders before they do more damage. It’s the defensive side of cybersecurity, the one that gets the fewest headlines and demands the most craft. And since this channel is also about opening doors, I ask her for advice for anyone who wants to make that leap from scratch or retrain from another sector. A curious detail: Marta started out in Spanish Philology, and that habit of devouring books at high speed ended up serving her to devour logs. The paths into cyber are never the ones you imagine.