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Sean Gallagher on Muck Rack

Sean Gallagher

(He/Him)
  • Senior Threat Researcher, Sophos Labs, Sophos
Eastern Region, Virginia
As seen in: CNN, Medium, Color Research & Application, Daily Mail, The Guardian, National Geographic, TechCrunch, WIRED (UK), WIRED Magazine, Ars Technica and
Covers:  Cybersecurity, cybercrime, artificial intelligence, national security, other things as assigned.
Doesn't Cover: My day job is exclusively research into cyber threats and our own AI research. I occasionally freelance for Ars on assignment. If you're looking for me to write something for Ars ask Lee Hutchinson.
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Sean Gallagher’s Biography

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Principal Threat Researcher, Sophos X-Ops.

Previously Ars Technica's IT and National Security Editor, focusing on the intersections of technology with national defense policy, politics, business, privacy, security and what have you.
Over 20 years of tech journalism experience, from test lab to news beats. Winner of two American Society of Business Publication Editors awards and one Neal award. Past positions include Managing Editor, InformationWeek Labs; Technology Editor, Baseline Magazine; E…

Sean Gallagher’s Journalist Portfolio

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Danish inventor gets life for murder, rape of journalist on personal submersible

Danish inventor gets life for murder, rape of journalist on personal submersible

Peter "Rocket" Madsen, the Danish inventor who sought to put himself into space aboard an amateur-built rocke…

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How a cracked fan blade (probably) ended a decade of no US air travel fatalities

How a cracked fan blade (probably) ended a decade of no US air travel fatalities

At 10:43am on April 17, Southwest Airlines Flight 1380 took off from New York's LaGuardia Airport bound for L…

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How to keep your ISP's nose out of your browser history with encrypted DNS

How to keep your ISP's nose out of your browser history with encrypted DNS

The death of network neutrality and the loosening of regulations on how Internet providers handle customers' …

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Prime Minister of Singapore shares his C++ code for Sudoku solver

Prime Minister of Singapore shares his C++ code for Sudoku solver

There are few national leaders who can say that they really understand technology. Even fewer of them have wr…

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Baaad attitude: Prank-messaging friends (and enemies) with Goat Attack [Updated]

Baaad attitude: Prank-messaging friends (and enemies) with Goat Attack [Updated]

Update: Goatattack.com announced on April 28 that the service is running again, but a sender's name is now re…

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NSA's Internet taps can find systems to hack, track VPNs and Word docs

NSA's Internet taps can find systems to hack, track VPNs and Word docs

The National Security Agency's broad Internet monitoring program can do a whole lot more than provide a look …

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Articles

Using AI to identify cybercrime masterminds

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By François Labrèche, Sean Gallagher
| Sophos
Online criminal forums, both on the public internet and on the “dark web” of Tor .onion sites, are a rich resource for threat intelligence researchers. The Sophos Counter Threat Unit (CTU) have a team of darkweb researchers collecting intelligence and interacting with darkweb forums, but combing through these posts is a time-consuming and resource-intensive task, and it’s always possible that things are missed.
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Phishing platform Rockstar 2FA trips, and “FlowerStorm” picks up the pieces

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By Mark Parsons, Joshua Rawles, Colin Cowie, Sean Gallagher
| Sophos
Editor’s note: Sophos MDR’s Jordon Olness also contributed significanty to this report. One of the Internet’s most prolific cybercrime-as-a-service operations recently suffered a setback: In November, Sophos MDR noticed that detections for the Rockstar2FA “phishing-as-a-service”(PaaS) platform had suddenly gone quiet.
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DeepSpeed: a tuning tool for large language models

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By Younghoo Lee, Sean Gallagher, Sean Bergeron
| Sophos
Large Language Models (LLMs) have the potential to automate and reduce the workloads of many types, including those of cybersecurity analysts and incident responders. But generic LLMs lack the domain-specific knowledge to handle these tasks well.
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See all 2,347 licensed articles (2,521 Total)

Interview

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What was your first job as a journalist?

As a freelancer, I wrote about trade finance. My first full-time gig was as assistant editor for a DC computer newspaper.

How is social media changing news?

Mostly in a bad way at this current juncture.

How do you prefer to be pitched on stories?

I prefer not to.

Awards

American Association of Business Publication Editors National Gold Award

2003 - Case History

With Larry Barrett, for McBusted—a case study of the failure of McDonalds' attempt to computerize the entire business process of its franchisees right down to how often the fryer oil was changed.

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Jesse H. Neal Award

2003 - Best recurring feature
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