28 Aug Black Hat 2025: Microsoft’s Threat Intel Experts Are “The Nerds In The Back”
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This week in cybersecurity from the editors at Cybercrime Magazine
Sausalito, Calif. – Aug. 28, 2025
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When a cyberattack occurs, Sherrod DeGrippo, director of threat intelligence strategy at Microsoft and a frequent guest on the Cybercrime Magazine Podcast, imagines threat hunters and incident responders answering the call to action on a red rotary phone and swooping in to save the day — maybe even rappelling from helicopters like heroes in an action movie.
To DeGrippo’s disappointment, according to BizTech, panelists at the recent Black Hat 2025 USA Conference in Las Vegas admitted that it’s nothing like that. The threat intelligence experts are “the nerds in the back,” said Simeon Kakpovi, senior threat intelligence analyst at Microsoft. “We get to put together a cheat sheet that we can hand over [to the incident response team], instead of them wasting time looking broadly.”
Travis Schack is the Principal Security Researcher at Microsoft, and lead investigator for their Incident Response team. Cybercrime Magazine caught up with Schack, who previously served as CISO for the State of Colorado, at Black Hat, where he told us about what Microsoft is doing to combat today’s vast cyber threat landscape.
Schack, a nerd out front, who we met in the bustling Business Hall where there were hundreds of exhibitors and thousands of attendees, told us: “You can walk, look around this place, and there’s a lot of solutions, a lot of companies trying to solve various problems, cyber resilience, Business Email Compromise (BEC), social engineering, and phishing, and just giving people visibility to what Microsoft can do.”
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