Alex Malone
Principal Software Engineer at Sophos
Austin, Texas, United States
Summary
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SeniorAlex Malone is a Principal Software Engineer in Austin with nine years of focused experience building high-performance, security-centric endpoint agents and telemetry—most recently leading the macOS effort at Secureworks and now contributing to Sophos’ combined macOS product. He combines deep systems-level C++ and Objective-C expertise with practical security engineering, evidenced by notable OSS contributions to osquery and redcanaryco/atomic-red-team where he added packet-capture tooling, BPF filters, and YARA memory/file-scan hardening. Comfortable as a hands-on technical lead, Alex has repeatedly diagnosed and rewritten performance-critical subsystems under pressure, including a major osquery events rewrite that rescued field deployments. He prefers turning complex platform and security challenges into simple, reliable solutions and plans to return to open source work through his GitHub packetzero.
9 years of coding experience
18 years of employment as a software developer
Github Skills (23)
mitre-attack10
c-language10
it-security10
linux10
c1110
networking10
bpf10
security10
c1710
sql10
packet-capture10
macos10
att10
cprogramming-language10
system-programming9
Programming languages (9)
Github contributions (5)
redcanaryco/atomic-red-team
Jun 2022 - Jan 2023
Small and highly portable detection tests based on MITRE's ATT&CK.
Role in this project:
Security Engineer
Security EngineerContributions:6 reviews, 20 commits, 9 PRs in 6 months
Contributions summary:Alex contributed significantly to packet capture utilities within the repository, adding both MacOS and Linux based capabilities using BPF and raw sockets. Their work involved implementing BPF filters for UDP traffic and integrating these capture tools for testing. The user also integrated kernel module load and unload tests, as well as tests related to manipulating the login window process on MacOS.
mitremitre-attackportable
osquery/osquery
Oct 2018 - Nov 2019
SQL powered operating system instrumentation, monitoring, and analytics.
Role in this project:Back-end & Security Engineer
Back-end & Security EngineerContributions:9 commits, 38 PRs, 196 comments in 1 year
Contributions summary:Alex contributed to the osquery project by addressing multiple aspects, including updating dependencies (AWS SDK), implementing a missing index for Windows processes, and fixing an issue that caused inefficiencies in table queries. Furthermore, the user added support for AWS session tokens, and also worked on memory management within the YARA module. The user also addressed security concerns by avoiding the scanning of special files in the Yara implementation, demonstrating a security-focused approach.
instrumentationanalyticsoperating-systemsecuritysql
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