Itay Cohen
Sr. Principal Security Researcher at Palo Alto Networks Unit 42
Tel-Aviv District, Israel
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolItay Cohen is a senior principal security researcher with nine years of hands-on experience in reverse engineering, malware research, incident response and threat hunting, currently leading research at Palo Alto Networks Unit 42. He previously led and grew Check Point’s global research teams and wrote influential analyses at Microsoft’s Windows Defender team, blending operational hunting with durable detection engineering. A core maintainer of the Rizin reverse-engineering framework (formerly radare2) and Cutter, his open-source contributions include UI, analysis and JSON integrations used widely by the RE community. He publishes the Megabeets blog to make advanced security topics accessible and regularly competes in CTFs, demonstrating a continual appetite for technical challenges. Known for mentoring top researchers, he combines military-grade operational experience from the IDF with pragmatic tool development across Python, C, C# and scripting languages. Colleagues describe him as autodidactic and relentless about turning complex threats into reproducible defenses.
9 years of coding experience
8 years of employment as a software developer
High School Computer Science Arabic, High School Computer Science Arabic at Rabin High SchoolHigh School Computer Software Engineering, High School Computer Software Engineering at Weizmann Institute of ScienceData Mining and Data Warehousing, Data Mining and Data Warehousing at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev
Hebrew, English
Stackoverflow
31reputation
4kreached
1answer
0questions
Github Skills (24)
cut10
debugging10
debug10
c-language10
qt10
dis10
slicer10
cookiecutter10
c1110
binarydiff10
c1710
disassembly10
command-line10
windows-gui10
reverse-engineering10
Programming languages (20)
Github contributions (5)
rizinorg/cutter
Apr 2018 - Jul 2021
Free and Open Source Reverse Engineering Platform powered by rizin
Role in this project:
Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:4 releases, 191 reviews, 207 commits in 3 years 3 months
Contributions summary:Itay contributed to implementing and improving features within the Cutter reverse engineering platform. Their work involved adding radare script loading functionality to the OptionsDialog and integrating entropy analysis into the Sections and Dashboard widgets. Additionally, the user made UI improvements to the Hexdump widget and graph visualizations. They also worked on fixing bugs related to the Disassembly context menu and Xrefs, adding features, and improving overall code quality.
rizinsecuritycybersecurityguiengineering
radareorg/radare2
Feb 2017 - Apr 2020
UNIX-like reverse engineering framework and command-line toolset
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:2 reviews, 41 commits, 69 PRs in 3 years 2 months
Contributions summary:Itay made various contributions to the radare2 reverse engineering framework. Their work included fixing bugs related to HTML output, correcting help messages in graph.c, and addressing issues with the "i" command by showing human-readable file sizes. The user also implemented JSON support for multiple commands and improved the functionality of existing features like the "axff" and "afns" commands. They also improved the "pdj" command.
unixbinary-analysissecurityradare2forensics
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