Senior Threat Behavior Researcher (UK)

**About Us** Sophos is a cybersecurity leader defending 600,000 organizations globally with an AI-driven platform and expert-led services. Sophos meets organizations wherever they are in their security maturity and grows with them to defeat cyberattacks. Its solutions combine machine learning, automation, and real-time threat intelligence with frontline human expertise from Sophos X-Ops to deliver advanced, 24/7 threat monitoring, detection, and response. Sophos offers industry-leading managed detection and response (MDR) alongside a comprehensive portfolio of cybersecurity technologies — including endpoint, network, email, and cloud security, extended detection and response (XDR), identity threat detection and response (ITDR), and next-gen SIEM. Together with expert advisory services, these capabilities help organizations proactively reduce risk and respond faster, with the visibility and scalability needed to stay ahead of evolving threats. Sophos goes to market with a global partner ecosystem, including Managed Service Providers (MSPs), Managed Security Service Providers (MSSPs), resellers and distributors, marketplace integrations, and cyber risk partners, giving organizations the flexibility to choose trusted relationships when securing their business. Sophos is headquartered in Oxford, U.K. More information is available at [](https://www.sophos.com). **Role Summary** Malware Researcher? Red/Blue/Purple team member? We have a fantastic opportunity here at Sophos Labs for a Threat Researcher role to join our global team of Behavioral Protection engineers, to hunt, to research, and to add real-time protection for suspicious activity across our customer environments. Our team of skilled security experts combine their passion to detect & disrupt cyber-attacks with their capability to develop protection rules that can cut through the noise in modern computing environments to tease out attacker’s nefarious activities. You are intrinsically motivated to understand the core logic behind malware and hacking attacks, to find & predict new ways attackers will modify their techniques and take great satisfaction in developing robust protection logic that is immune to evasive actions. You will be responsible for writing behavioral protection rules that are able to block malicious activities across all types of TTP (even if a Mitre Technique doesn’t exist yet). This is the foundation of Sophos next-gen approach. Above all - you enjoy thinking creatively; combining your deep technical knowledge, your tenacity for innovation, and your can-do attitude to solve complex and challenging problems on daily basis. Additionally, you will also be supporting our remediation effort to remove artifacts left behind, by writing cleanup rules, and supporting our Sandbox development, such as (but not limited to) creating signatures, identifying evasion techniques that prevent the sandbox from running the threat smoothly. ### What You Will Do - Conduct in-depth behavioral analysis of Windows threats. - Develop Behavioral rules for various threat behaviors including hands-on keyboard attack, malware payloads, initial attack vectors and Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs). - Produce quality threat analysis reports for both internal and external audience. - Assist in sandbox improvements by analyzing malware that hinders the sandbox environment in running the threat, which deploys various anti-analysis techniques. - Develop Cleanup rules to remove artifacts that are left behind by the behavioral protection rules. - Collaborate with other cross-functional teams to improve behavioral protection capability based on the threat analysis. - Guide and train junior team members in assisting malware analysis, peer code review. - Assist in the development of tools wherever necessary to improve day-to-day task. ### What You Will Bring - Strong knowledge of Windows Internals including Memory management, Processes, Threads. - Proficiency in both static and dynamic analysis of threats, using tools such as IDAPro, WinDbg. - Demonstrated programming experience. Preferred: Python, Lua. - Excellent communication skills with the ability to demonstrate complex technical problem to peer researchers as well as to product engineering team. - Excellent analytical and problem-solving skills with the ability to think strategically and creatively. - Bachelor’s degree in computer software (Computer Security preferable) or equivalent experience.