James Shank, Chief Architect of Community Services and Senior Security Evangelist

Joining Team Cymru ten years ago, James Shank has contributed to several efforts within Team Cymru and within the broader Information Security community. From the start of his tenure, James served as SME and lead developer over Team Cymru's highest volume and highest velocity data processing services. He quickly rose through the leadership ranks to become Engineering Team Lead and Manager of Engineering, before joining a team focused on rapid proof of concept research and development. With an interest and passion for people over technology, James gravitated towards community-focused efforts and now serves as Chief Architect of Community Services and Senior Security Evangelist. His informal title is “nerd who can talk to people.”
Throughout his career at Team Cymru, James has contributed to community efforts to fight malicious activity online. Serving on the DNS Changer Working Group, contributing to Mirai research efforts, and helping to analyze WireX are a few examples of James' community contributions. Today, James focuses on bringing about lasting and substantive changes to Information Security on a global scale, participating in many trust-based groups and adhoc task force efforts. Of note, James played a part in tracking and analyzing the actors and campaign that later became known as Sea Turtle. With a focus on remediation, James analyzed actor TTPs and notified victims. Seeing some shortcomings in the global DNS as a result of the Sea Turtle actors’ success, James and several friends started a project called DNS Transparency, where the aim is to provide a lasting solution to make DNS changes to TLD zones auditable and verifiable. Applying a similar perspective to BGP, James is working with community members to bring a similar level of transparency to BGP updates.